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That info is pure gold rodw, thanks a bunch!
- Dual homing switches were the plan yeah, just checking if it's fine to have a single limit switch or if i need one i both sides?
- I'm currently using a PWM output + an RC circuit to get 0-5v for my spindle RPM but had already got the suggestion of using serial to talk with the VFD, glad to confirm that is a good approach.
- IO modules, if i can get what i need from used beckoff listings on ebay i might go that way. The servo inputs should take care of all the homing/limits, and if the VFD is handled separately, one of the most common ones with 16 IO might just do for e-stops, probes.. And i can always just add another module if that changes.

The concept of the break is also new to me, is this something you need to config or it's something that's handled automatically between the servo and its driver?

I don't think you will have any problems getting the drive going. I'ver noted many attempts with this drive have been flawed from the very beginning. The fact is they are cia402  drives and this means the core Ethercat registers are standardized and there are components to follow the cia402 state machine to start the drive. 

I would use Linuxcnc homing and forget about internal homing for now because of your 2 joint main axis (We would say XYYZ). Internal homing of a joint axis by Ethercat is a bit unknown/unsupported. Note having homing switches on both sides is mandatory on gantry machines. The gantry is auto squared on homing.

There should be some inputs on the servos themselves you could use if configured to be generic inputs in your ethercat-conf.xml. The safest/easiest IO would be to use Beckhoff EK1100 but there are several on AliExpress like Rtelligent, deiwu (I have used both, configs here github.com/rodw-au/linuxcnc-cia402) and another with an encoder input called catio-a which is mostly documented here on the forum. I have one of these and the forum config generally works (I have one of these too).

Note that the Beckhoff encoder modules are quite expensive but with a printnc style spindle, you probably don't have a spindle encoder. You could use RS485 modbus for spindle control with a USB or RS232(preferred) RS485 interface. This works pretty well with ethercat. I've been playing with the modbus control on the catio-a and  read one register once but then could never repeat it after adding all of the required registers.

Good luck

As I'm planning to do live coin minting at some events I attend, I will retrofit a proxon milling thing to make my own coin dies.
Model is this one:
forum.drucktipps3d.de/file-download/12960/
I'm in contact with a nice austrian guy, who has done that before LinuxCNC exists (uses some old DOS software via par port). So the mechanical part is quite proven.
Plan is as follows:
- replace all threads with ballscrews
- a mesa 7i96s (have that from a dead project)
- stepper motor and microstepper driver (from yet another dead project)
- maybe place a 1:6 gear between stepper and ballscrew (this is actually trick from the austrian guy) for higher detail
My main question is about the milling spindle. As I will mill little amounts of material, I was aiming for some small spindle (partially for lower weight to have faster and more precise movements). On the other hand it should have quite high rpm and very good concentricity.

So far I was thinking a AMB 530 FME. At least I couldn't find a lighter one that would serve the purpose.

Please let me know if my plan might generate a working machine or if I have a major f-put in my plan.

Yes. I shelved this idea. The faceplate on the VFD made it quite clear that it isn't going to take 240. I have a buckboost to take 240 to 272. Hoping that this will give me enough power for the analog drives. Will use 240V single phase to power a VFD for a much lower HP spindle. Will also use 240V single phase to power any additional drives. Not super sure exactly which MESA setup I'm going with yet. Have to confirm that the analog drives are good first. I was wondering if I could just hook up the 10V to a 1.5V battery and make the drives move the steppers.

- I'm going to first disconnect the brushed servos from the analong drives. Power leads, encoders, everything.
- I guess I can first check the DC bus this by sending in 120V. This should give me close to 170VDC.
- If math serves me right, the DC bus should be 390V rectified with the single 277V leg. With my transformer, it should be 385V. Wondering if the drive cares whether the negative leg of the DC bus input is tied to ground. If it does matter, I'm not sure how to proceed from here. Not exactly sure how to check.
- From here, I am guessing that connecting a 1.5V battery to the drive "should" make the drive send out a tiny bit of the DC bus DC voltage. Since I'm not connecting it to anything, i should be fine. 

Will try to understand more from first principles but most appreciate any pointers.

I think you are on the right track.

Single-phase to the machine, and use 220vac step/dir drives and a 220 vac single-phase-in, 3-phase-out VFD for your spindle.

Based on some low-cost (maybe Stepperonline A6) servo specs, you've probably got enough power budget to realistically drive 4/ea 1kw servos (XYYZ), a couple of 750w servos (A&C), plus a 4-6kw VFD for a decent ATC spindle.

If you want a big vacuum for hold-down or dust collection, you might need to put that on a separate circuit.

I'd recommend planning on using timer relays (hardware or software-driven) for the drive and VFD main contactors.  Cheaper drives (and some expensive ones, too) don't have great inrush-limiting features and turning everything all on at once can strain (or overload) the supply circuit.  If you break up the inrush over 2-3 'stages' with some on-delay timers it'll be a lot more gentle.

Clear the estop and you'll hear clunk...clunk...clunk... over a few seconds before everything is ready.

Hi, my bad i did not mean COM but parallel port (must be a habit from my Arduino days). I did try to put the encoders on the second par port (parport 1) and for some reason it works now (parport 0 = stepper outputs, parport1 = encoder inputs). No idea why, i don´t think it is grounding related though.
As for the encoders: They are linear scales (5µm), my math was 5000 to 10000PPS * 0.005mm * 60 = 1500 to 3000 mm/min. The spindle has a 400PPR Encoder and max spindle speed is 3000rpm.
I still have to get the inputs on parport0 working to read the spindle encoder. Tomorrow i can send pics of the wiring.

Thank you!
-existing stuff
I don't see why I cannot use the existing drives for the existing servos. The intention was not to replace those at all. For the VFD, I very much want a water cooled VFD tho I have been told that it takes up a lot of extra vertical real estate. In the end, I'll be a one person outfit for a while anyway, so maybe I can just say screw you OSHA and just deal with the noise on that 16hp spindle. I will never use the full capacity, so as long as I can start it up, I think I should be alright. I imagine I can do some sort of a ramp up start with the VFD settings. That reminds me to check if it works.

-can I mix drives? the swivel head that I have will comes with yaskawa servos and no drives(or I can add drives). I cannot imagine there being as issue to mixing and matching. And concerns with mixing analog/digital?

**********
-if you still want to replace the drives, you have two choices in general: EtherCAT or Mesa with normal step/dir or analog servos (do not bother to look at steppers and close loop steppers)

I'll have to research this. I do not know if the current servos are closed loop ones. The ones on the X and Y axis are mts30r4-42. They have 3 power leads (2 bigger wires, 1 thinner). I've confirmed that I can get a voltage if i turn the servos by hand. The resistance is above the plate, but still under 2ohms. 4 brushes in good condition. There are 4 other pairs of wires that I found out are A, B, Index and Power. Haven't wrapped my head aroud thinking about them from first principles yet. Would this existing hardware affect any of my choices?

-For the Mesa/new drives, i would look for "position and velocity" mode drives (analog +-10V and step/dir) and also with encoder outputs (all have encoder inputs or absolute encoders, usually serial ones) so the loop can be closed in LinuxCNC with both types of control, makes life easier during use. Given the choice between analog and step/dir, choose step/dir.
>>> I'm going to research this paragraph a little more first.

I was wondering if there are good software or schematics for recreating the wiring. I found the Fagor 8055 manual, but it seems more like how to use it rather than how to fix it.

Thank you!

I might not be the best person to reply to this as i absolutely enjoy retrofitting and bringing back to life old machines, so i may be a bit on the "trigger happy" side, but:
-i would try to use the existing drives and motors and VFD/spindle
-seems like those are analog drives, so a Mesa 7i97T would do perfectly fine if you can find one, if not a 7i92T with 7i77 is the same thing, or if those are also scarce a 7i96S with 7i85 and 7i83 should do the same job.
-if you still want to replace the drives, you have two choices in general: EtherCAT or Mesa with normal step/dir or analog servos (do not bother to look at steppers and close loop steppers)
-You will be bombarded by others to choose EtherCAT, i am still avoiding them due to some fuzzy communication issues, but i will test them for sure the fist chance i get.
-For the Mesa/new drives, i would look for "position and velocity" mode drives (analog +-10V and step/dir) and also with encoder outputs (all have encoder inputs or absolute encoders, usually serial ones) so the loop can be closed in LinuxCNC with both types of control, makes life easier during use. Given the choice between analog and step/dir, choose step/dir.

You don't say what the inputs to and2.2 are. That is probably important.

A problem you will have is that spindle.0.index-enable is a bidirectional HAL pin, so can't be directly connected to the output of an and2 block.

You can probably work around this with linuxcnc.org/docs/stable/html/man/man9/tristate_bit.9.html

But, are you sure that your spindle encoder driver doesn't offer e direct, bidirectional, index-enable pin?

There is an example of an index-simulator HAL component here:
forum.linuxcnc.org/24-hal-components/388...ation?start=0#223508

It's written for a stepper spindle, but should work just as well (or just as badly) for an absolute encoder assuming that the encoder has an integer "counts" output.


I was going to suggest watching one bit of the binary counts value and tristate-bit. But that wouldn't zero the counts on index.

There _is_ a way to do it with a sample-hold to capture the counts at index, then subtracting that from the raw counts, that would need a bitslice, mux_generic (set up for signed int), edge, and tristate-bit HAL component.
It's do-able but at that point the custom HAL component makes more sense.

It's easy when you know it.
The problem is to come to know enough.

Anyway, it's not that hard and there is virtually no difference between
setting up stepper drives or servo drives with EtherCAT.
The cia402 layer makes them look the same.

The example I gave is a starting point.
You can copy the files to your installation, change the HALFILE=cia402.hal in the ini file
and give it a try.

But you are going to need to adopt and edit the files to your specific setup.
Number of drives, what number/name they have. And you need to add other
functions like spindle. That's in the sim file. So you need to mix them together
and take the motion part from cia402.hal and the other functions spindle, limits etc
from the sim config.
 

Update:
i have copied the "working" fies from page 1 into my axis.sim folder, removed the date in their names and put the Basic.hal to be called in the axis.ini file. now the axis.sim does not start and i get this error log: 
Print file information:
RUN_IN_PLACE=no
LINUXCNC_DIR=
LINUXCNC_BIN_DIR=/usr/bin
LINUXCNC_TCL_DIR=/usr/lib/tcltk/linuxcnc
LINUXCNC_SCRIPT_DIR=
LINUXCNC_RTLIB_DIR=/usr/lib/linuxcnc/modules
LINUXCNC_CONFIG_DIR=
LINUXCNC_LANG_DIR=/usr/lib/tcltk/linuxcnc/msgs
INIVAR=inivar
HALCMD=halcmd
LINUXCNC_EMCSH=/usr/bin/wish8.6
LINUXCNC - 2.9.8
Machine configuration directory is '/home/christian/linuxcnc/configs/sim.axis'
Machine configuration file is 'axis.ini'
INIFILE=/home/christian/linuxcnc/configs/sim.axis/axis.ini
VERSION=1.1
PARAMETER_FILE=sim.var
TPMOD=
HOMEMOD=
TASK=milltask
HALUI=halui
DISPLAY=axis
COORDINATES=X Y Z
KINEMATICS=trivkins
Starting LinuxCNC...
Starting LinuxCNC server program: linuxcncsvr
Loading Real Time OS, RTAPI, and HAL_LIB modules
Starting LinuxCNC IO program: io
Starting HAL User Interface program: halui
linuxcnc TPMOD=tpmod HOMEMOD=homemod EMCMOT=motmod
Found file(lib): /usr/share/linuxcnc/hallib/core_sim.hal
Found file(lib): /usr/share/linuxcnc/hallib/sim_spindle_encoder.hal
Found file(lib): /usr/share/linuxcnc/hallib/axis_manualtoolchange.hal
Found file(lib): /usr/share/linuxcnc/hallib/simulated_home.hal
Found file(lib): /usr/share/linuxcnc/hallib/check_xyz_constraints.hal
Found file(REL): ./cooling.hal
Found file(REL): ./Basic.hal
Shutting down and cleaning up LinuxCNC...
Removing HAL_LIB, RTAPI, and Real Time OS modules
Removing NML shared memory segments

Debug file information:
Note: Using POSIX realtime
trivkins: already exists
./Basic.hal:3: waitpid failed /usr/bin/rtapi_app trivkins
./Basic.hal:3: /usr/bin/rtapi_app exited without becoming ready
./Basic.hal:3: insmod for trivkins failed, returned -1
2381
Stopping realtime threads
Unloading hal components
Note: Using POSIX realtime

1. Over the winter I modified my DYI Router Mill adding a tandem Y axis and rebuilding my Z axis support with a 2-DF gimbal  to true the spindle to the table. Today, I attempted to home the machine however, when the Y axes homed, one triggered before the other causing LCNC to complain about not being able to home one axis while the other is moving off the the home position.

What the the best way to resolve this issue such that both axes travel together, both for homing and moving off the home switch.

2. Using PNCCONF for configuring LCNC with tandem Y axes, when testing the Y axis only one of the steppers responds. Is there something that I missed in PNCCONF that will allow both Y steppers to be tested together?

3. What is the .ini PARAMETER that tells LCNC that two axes are in tandem?

Kind Regards,

Hi JRC,Thanks for sharing your spindle configuration — it was really helpful. I’ve also replaced the original spindle motor with a 1000W servo from StepperOnline, and I’m  pleased with how it’s performing so far - machine has its limitations but for aluminium it seems good so far. I’ve nearly completed my enclosures; I just need to install a  coolant system and add the chip tray and filtration underneath to separate the swarf properly.I’m running the Probe Basic interface as well, which I find very intuitive and easy to use.I have the ATC fitted to my machine but haven’t configured it yet. Do you have an ATC installed on yours? If so, would you be willing to share your configuration files (INI, HAL, etc.)? That would be a huge help.Also, I’d really appreciate a bit more detail on the cylinders you’re using to counterbalance the spindle weight.I’m currently designing a 3D-printed cover for the ATC and would be happy to share it once it’s finished.Thanks again Will 
 


 

Is there an easy way to get the feed rate to show up on the screen somewhere? (old 2.7x version)
For various reasons (I use some css and when it's working well I'd like to know what combination of rpm and feed it's actually using) I'd like to see the actual feed the z-axis is on my lathe as it cuts whatever given diameter. I've got a add-on panel showing the actual spindle RPM so although not as straight forward there should be a way of showing the actual FEED of whatever axis. Since somewhere in there should be the pulse rate of the stepper I think it might be available or would I need to have an encoder on that motor/ballscrew and calculate out the feed that way ???
Mooser
 

Hi and so much thanks to the people made all the work with the linuxcnc for raspberry pi 5 ,its a great job.
I have downloaded 4.8.9 and it's a great distro working so fine from beguining and today after a week or two the program stop and freze after 5-10 min. I can still run the stepper from the keyboard and the speedometer on the spindle is i ok and run but the rest of the program stop . the only way to go on is a hard rebot and then it start fine and then the problem starts again . Are there people who can help me in the right direction 
I use the byte2bot board in Lathe config. /krister