Advanced Search

When this feature was developed, the feeling was the pierce delay should still be used. Does it work for you if you try it?

In the ini file the HOME_SEQUENCE determines the home order on a home all. If two axes have the same sequence, they will home together. The exception is joint axes on a gantry which must home seperately.

Hi folks,

The time has come!

I've owned a Bridgeport VMC760 for the last 4 years. It's been used in my prototyping/fabrication shop here in Australia. The Heidenhain 370 control and Siemens drives have served me well in this time, up until yesterday, when one of the servo drives went bang.

While I'm looking into replacing this drive, I'm also entertaining a retrofit. The machine is a 97' and I fear that I'll be tipping further money into the those drives at some stage. I've never tackled a retrofit of this level, but I've had experience building CNC machines in the past with my business. A couple of one-off 3/4 axis machines for client's specific manufacturing and a home-brew 'Datron' like router we used heavily before the VMC (and still use for high speed spindle applications).

Ideally the retrofit would look something like this:

New axis servos and drives (Interested in Leadshine's newer offerings, but I've had good experiences with DMM, Delta's and Clearpath in the past)
New spindle motor and drive (I've been looking at SVC VFD and encoders to handle orientation, rigid taping etc)

Preference to Ethercat communication for flexibility and wiring
Linux control with a touch screen and a few machine specific buttons up front
Full closed loop control on all axis
Very interested in running this from a Pi5 

Ideally retain the original auxiliary control boards (the boards running the contactors for lube, coolant, tool change etc)
These boards look like the take simple logic signals from the Heidenhain.
Retain full operation of the carousel tool changer. Fairly typical Geneva drive style of the time with AC motors and inductive sensors.

The major gaps in my knowledge (I'm sure there are plenty to be honest) are regarding the following points:

I've never worked with Ethercat, but flexibility and lack of wiring are intriguing. Can an Ethercat system run full closed loop control?

Spindle sytem. Originally this machine had 9kw of continuous (11kw peak) power and 76Nm of torque (93Nm peak), 6000rpm max. I'd like to keep such performance. Is a large SVC VFD AC setup with linux/software based spindle synchronisation the right avenue?

Running LinuxCNC on a raspberry Pi. I've only every run it on old scrap PC's with parallel ports back in the hobby days. Latency was always an issue!

I understand most people would suggest binning the machine or just fixing what's there. CNC machines, even on the secondhand market are not as plentiful or cheap here in Australia. It's a decent sized machine that's produced some great work for us in the past and most importantly, it's already in our workshop!

I'll post some pictures when I'm in the workshop later today.

Any input on these topics is very welcomed and appreciated!!

Thanks,

John
 

Forgot to mention whatt the docs don't say. To square the machine, making marks in each corner of the bed with the spindle and measuring diagonals is the most accurate way on a large bed. Adjust until equal.
Me, I just measured each side with a dial indicator from a common reference. 

Squaring the gantry is done during homing and relies on the HOME_OFFSET for alignment.
It is super easy to do if you read the most important part of the documents, homing configuration
linuxcnc.org/docs/stable/html/config/ini-homing.html
Except you will probably need to read this page 3 to 10 times....

Thanks for the help, it loaded after changing lcec name to D1 and D2, and after I commented out several lines.

ethercat slaves shows both are on OP mode, but I am sure I don't currently have enough pins defined for motion control.

I need to work out what those line problems are, some are just not defined and some are type mismatch, but I may be able to work that out.

This is a really annoying bug from Debian. This fixes it.
This was in Debian 12.1 their initial Bookworm Release and fixed in Debian 12.2 a month or so later.
But they never updated the code in thie Debian Live installer. Debian must have used a fork of this to build their images and never bothered to correct the Debian Live system.
Its not something we can fix in our ISO. We did tell the builder to exclude it and it works but as soon as you do an apt upgrade, it comes back.

 

Lcec isn't ethercat it is just an interface to ethercat, at the most a driver to use ethercat.
How well do you think your method works in this case?
Maybe if there was a detailed guide on how to set this up, and what to do in case of problem?
More than once I have wished to refer to RTFM but there isn't one.

fixed it somehow, here is what i did:

the way I connect to the mesa is from network connections I edit the network connection IPv4 setting and add a static address there 10 10 10 100, previously it had a gateway which I removed ( my other PC has this and works with it)

then I read that there is an error with the gvcp-panel.ui HAL_table.rows. I simply removed the tick for this during the pncConf wizard,

I am now able to open linuix cbc from the Launch fle on my desktop. I don't know what the gvcp does and why its buggy. but seems to be okay for now. will post later if something pops up.

PCW wrote:

Yes, a fairly ancient version of mesaflash (3.4.9)  is included with the
LinuxCNC 2.9.4 ISO, this is supposedly fixed for later releases.

I don't think mesaflash is included in V 2.9.4 in our ISOs because it is seperate to Linuxcnc and has its own Deb file.
If that is the case, 2.9.4 will just get the very early version in the Bookworm repo.
Perhaps Our Debian build system should be modified to  make mesaflash so it gets stored in our repos

Hakan wrote:

Maybe not ethercat as such but an lcec issue.
 

lcec is Ethercat (the Linuxcnc ethercat hal driver)

following the troubleshooting I outlined would unearth it all.

xlordofpainx wrote:

i get command not found on many of the commands from the text tutorial

Most of them are installed on our ISOs and IMGs on the downloads page. If you use another install method, you need to install them.

Maybe not ethercat as such but an lcec issue.
There are so many places this can go wrong, syntax mistakes.
Now I saw another thing. There is a name="D1" in the client line.
Then you should use lcec.0.D1 instead of lcec.0.0

Can you post your hal/ini files?

Might help with more eyes looking at them
 

I am trying to get my machine to run for the first time on a new PC here is my post: www.forum.linuxcnc.org/38-general-linuxc...inated-with-an-error

I can ping the mesa, I can run the motors during pnc conf, but I can't start the launch after that. Thanks in advance