Servo tuning Step/Dir

Hi Guys,

I have a converted hass mini mill running 1kw Ac servos, I am using them in Step and Direction mode. At the moment, they are not feeding back into my Mesa 7i95T.

First question is there any benefit to feeding the encoder back to the controller?
And can/should I tune the PID? im at the understanding that this is only for analogue drives?
I am getting the occasional follow error, Im set at 1 and 0.5 which is really high. and im only running at 6000mm/s 

Any advice would be great.

Tnanks 

Typically there is not much advantage in using encoders on step/dir systems
unless you have linear scales.

If you get following errors, I would first increase this number:

setp hm2_[MESA](BOARD).0.dpll.01.timer-us -50

to:

setp hm2_[MESA](BOARD).0.dpll.01.timer-us -200

Also check that the stepgen maxaccel values have sufficient headroom
from the joint and axis maxaccel values.

The stepgen values should be at least 25% greater than the joint/axis
values if no backlash compensation is used and at least 225% of the joint/axis
values if backlash compensation is used.

Also check

hm2_7i95.0.packet-error-total

To make sure no packets are being dropped due to network timeouts.