Biesse Rover 346 Retrofit

Are the serial IO cards p260? I might have what you are looking for. Let me know. Thanks.

Hi pmcstoneinc!
I have some p260 cards and a chinese usb/rs485. I would like to use those cards but I have no driver or communication protocol. Could you share your solution?

Thanks

You can use those modules and solder wires onto the relays and not use the rs485 comm stuff. The advantage is they have snubber circuits on them already and some of the solenoids on these machines have alot of kickback voltage spikes. I froze my 7i77 board like this and needed a restart to recover from it.

I also have access to a spectrum analyzer, and decided not to go down that route as it would be too long a delay, and besides my machine is a 1995 and they started the rs485 relay/input modules in 1996 or 1997. It sure would make it easier for retrofitting these machines if it were done...... Retrofitting would be a breeze with these modules.

Does your machine have tool changer and how many spindles? 3?

Let me know if you need help, I just finished a Rover 346 with mesa cards.

Get a 7i74 and put remote 7i84's and/or 7i70/7i71 cards. You would just have to rn cat 5/6 cables from control panel to the locations of the modules.

just a thought.

Hi Bevins

This machine is a Rover 15 build in 1998. Yes it have a 3 post tool changer, one spindle, one saw and one drilling head.
The first plan would be to use:
1 7i25
1 7i77
Remote IO
1 7I70
1 7I71
1 7I84

But after reading your post I have doubts if the 7i71 and 7i84 outputs ( 300mA ) will survive turn the solenoids on and off.
Maybe soldering wires in the p260 modules from the 7i71 and 7i84 outputs... but this is not so nice.
The ideal solution is decrypt the rs485 communication protocol used by p260 modules and write a hal driver, but this is very difficult for me.
It seems that pmcstoneinc has found the solution to use these modules.
I can pay for the work for someone do this hal driver. Or pay for someone who has already developed this driver to share the work.
Maybe I can use wireshark to monitor the serial communication between the modules and the original cnc control and so post the captured file for some capable developer to study and write the linuxcnc driver for these modules.

Hi all,

I'm doing the same retrofit, on a 346

I'm using 5i25 + 7i77 + 7i74 and 7i84 + 7i71 on Z axis, 7i71 + 7i70 on table/changer, every outputs are interfaced with relays.

a better option is to use 7166-24 which have more powerful outputs to drive directly the solenoids.

I've planned to use the CNI modules, but the protocol is very odd (9bits serial) and as modules are not really fresh, I think it's a lot of work to use that modules that will fail in some years. If you want to go that way, arduinos use Atmel MCU that can talk in 9 bits serial.

Salvaging modules to use their relays was not an option for me as there is no room in the Z axis to fit the MESA cards in addition to CNI modules.

In addition, remember that those machines have 1 vfd for every spindles, and need a Hal component to set the values for motors at every tool change involving 2 different spindles.

I used the existing modules with the 7i77, 7i70 7i74 and 7i84
These outputs drive the Biesse relays and I have no issue at all with them. Everything is working.

My Biesse 346 has three spindles and one VFD. I do everything with remapping TxM6. Everything works as expected. Including selecting the spindle that needs to get the VFD signal routed to it.

I don't understand why you would need to change the values for different spindles unless you have different spindle types.

These machines have contactors that route the VFD to the required spindle. So I am not understanding why you would need anything different that LCNC is providing from the existing build. I am using this machine and have three spindles and a tool changer.

Simply select the contactor that routes the vfd output to the correct spindle in your toolchange routine depset.ending on which tool was

Hello,

on the 346 I'm working on, I have 2 ISO30 spindles, which have the same specs. But the circular saw motor is smaller and slower. The original config switches parameters for number of poles, max current, max speed, etc on the fly at each toolchange. I'm not sure it's safe to run the smaller motor with parameters for bigger ones. If the smaller motor fail, the vfd will trip an error when current rise bigger motor current limit. At this time I plan to wrote a component which switches the parameters using modbus.