Yaskawa Amps and drives.

Hello,
I was wondering if anybody could help me out in testing some Yaskawa amps and drives. My company purchased a used Morbidelli Super Planet which is a rather large multi-function CNC. Currently we're unable to communicate with it and I believe the culprit is the num controller. Both Morbidelli and num are proving difficult to work with, and neither wants to help us setup this system in spite of paying for multi-year support but I digress.

I don't really have a lot of knowledge in this field and reading the manuals is proving difficult for a beginner.

The equipment is:
1 num p1080w (which i believe isn't working)
1 yaskawa SGDH-15DEY12
7 yaskawa SGDH-10DE
2 yaskawa SGDH-50DEY12
2 yaskawa SGDH-30DEY12

the only drives I can find that aren't buried behind metal are:
SGMAH-03DAA61


Is there a way I can communicate with these yaskawa amps directly to ensure that they function? ...Maybe spin the tools up and down or something?

I resurrected an old SCM Routomat the used a Num 1040 control. It was a lot of work. The hardest part was restoring the control's memory and plc programming. Because the controller's memory battery was long dead. Luckily there were back up copies saved on the pc front end computer's hard drive. I ended up having SCM send out a tech to work out the last couple of details and show me the finer details how to set up and run the machine and how to use its specific commands to run it.

If the old PC hard drive would have been dead and the plc backups lost. I would have ripped out the Num and converted to Linuxcnc. (Sometimes I wish I had.)

Those are quite standard servo drives that have both step /dir position mode and analog velocity and torque mode interfaces.

So yes, they are relatively easy to test but without a properly setup test fixture you are likely to damage the mechanics or yourself unless you disconnect the motors from the linear axis.

I'm pretty green when it comes to this stuff. Is there a guide somewhere to do this, preferably without spending hundreds of dollars on controller boards? Is there some way to control these things directly over serial? If I'm not asking the right questions, that's good to know too, please let me know...Any information is valuable at this stage.

Thanks.

I would test with step/dir first time since it is easy to setup and less liable to run-away
if setup wrong and can be tested with a junk PC + a 5$ breakout board.

A few hundred dollars is pocket change in comparison to the price of that machine new, or even the cost of calling out a properly trained tech to service it. Running a big router like this isn't cheap. For example rebuilding the main spindle usually costs $5-10k.

PCW wrote:

I would test with step/dir first time since it is easy to setup and less liable to run-away
if setup wrong and can be tested with a junk PC + a 5$ breakout board.

Thanks for the reply! I can definitely scrounge up a junk PC easily enough but what kind of breakout board am I looking for?

Todd wrote:

A few hundred dollars is pocket change in comparison to the price of that machine new, or even the cost of calling out a properly trained tech to service it. Running a big router like this isn't cheap. For example rebuilding the main spindle usually costs $5-10k.

Oh no doubt. We fully expect to spend a fair amount of money but I don't want to spend 300-400 bucks on something that will be used literally once, or may not even be suitable. ...And ideally, we want a fully trained tech to come look at this system, the trouble we're having is that the company that manufactures this machine has been difficult to work with, essentially telling us to purchase a new machine instead of sending a tech out to look at it.

For my SCM that has a similar control and servo drives, I would choose a 5i25, 7i77, 7i73, and I think 3 of Mesa's 7i84 remote serial IO cards. (This machine has a lot of digital IO.) (This machine has been one minor malfunction away from getting a Linuxcnc retrofit for a while now and I've worked through most of the details.)

I like having the analog servo control with encoder feedback.
While your drives may be capable of digital inputs, they are likely controlled by analog signals in your application with that control (mine are.) I'm not certain all of those model servo drives always came with the option of having both control input types.