Emco PC turn 55 upgrade..

So you have the mesa card talking to the original drives/steppers, or did you end up ripping all the original electronics out? From one of your earlier posts I thought the former, but this last comment about a "complete rebuild" make me think it's the latter?

Take out what you don't need or can't use leave what you do/can. You need to examine every component in the system and understand what it does, how it works. You will need a good multimeter and a scope at a bare minimum, a logic analayser won't hurt. If the machine is already working don't bother with a retrofit. Use it till something dies (it will) then do it. Start with standard linuxcnc, not path pilot, you will learn much more...

Finally getting back to my PC Turn 55 project as I have been quite busy with a bunch of other things.

Please note that while I am generally reasonably technical and comfortable tearing the back panel open and reading documentation, I am not an expert in LinuxCNC nor in motion control in general, so posting here in hopes that others, who know more than I do can help me double check my work before I let the magic smoke out of any of this since after-all as much as I hate the older WinNC software, it is working.

It turns that at some point (my revision is A6P_V01) Emco ditched the 5-phase steppers in favor of 3-phase as can be seen in the electrical documentation ( Scan )

The motor used for the axis is a VRDM366/50LHA ( PDF ), and the stepper drivers take differential input. (see page 15 of the PDF).

The spindle is controlled by a Lenze 8202-E vector drive and as others have documented it is fitted with an encoder.

My conclusion so far is that I can reuse most of the existing electronics while ripping out the control bits and replacing with Mesa hardware. The turret may be a challenge but at least a couple of people have been able to get it going and there is a Boxford ATC component in the HAL library that should serve as a starting point.

Am I missing anything thus far?

jcposada wrote: Am I missing anything thus far?

Probably

But nothing unsurmountable. Make a start and come back if you get stuck.

I bought jcposada's lathe. I've only had it for a week, but it may be time for linuxcnc. It's been a PITA dealing with the obsolete g code formatting and the fact that I haven't been able to figure out how to open a file in WinNC. Last night I kept getting errors "x-axis not ready," or "z-axis not ready" which stopped anything from working.

Hi Turbo,

Since you are interested in going the linuxCNC route I will share with you my conclusions from the time I invested contemplating this project.

1. You can reuse the existing steppers with Vexta drivers which can be found on Ebay.
2. The VFD and spindle motor can also be used.
3. The biggest challege will be the turret. There is an open source board that was developed by one of the members here called the toolerator. It was developed for the for the larger Emco cousins (120,220,compact 6) but it should not be that hard to make it work. There are other solutions too based on arduino. Study the Emco 120 and similar build threads.

Juan

I'm still figuring out whether LinuxCNC will work for me or not. I'm pretty much married to Fusion360, so I want to know if the G code is in the same format as one of their existing post processors, like Tormach or HAAS or modern Fanuc. I've already got the Autodesk people making me a custom post for the obsolete Fanuc on the EMCO, so I don't want to say sorry I switched to LinuxCNC so make me a new post for that.

It looks like those Vexta drives are one box per axis. They are all used and they're not cheap. Then I need a breakout board. I'm looking at the G540 as the simplest solution.

turbo wrote: I'm still figuring out whether LinuxCNC will work for me or not. I'm pretty much married to Fusion360, so I want to know if the G code is in the same format as one of their existing post processors, like Tormach or HAAS or modern Fanuc. I've already got the Autodesk people making me a custom post for the obsolete Fanuc on the EMCO, so I don't want to say sorry I switched to LinuxCNC so make me a new post for that. .

I just tried Fusion. The emc and linuxcnc post-processors do not support lathe at the moment.
The Tormach Slant-Pro post processor (naturally) does support lathes, and the slant-pro runs PathPilot which is a slightly-modified LinuxCNC. (called PathPilot)

Having just done a test-shape the only difficulty is that PathPilot uses the format T0101 to say that it wants tool 01 and offset 01.
It isn't as simple to work round this as to just use tool numbers 0101, 0202 0303 etc as PathPilot on a lathe uses T with no M6 or G43 to do a tool change and apply offsets.

A neater alternative is to use the modifications demonstrated in sim/axis/lathe-fanucy demo config which uses a remapped "T" word to behave in a "lathe like" way.

You should be able to run the sim/axis/lathe-fanucy config with output from Fusion360 and using the Tormach Slant-Pro post without any modifications to the G-code (and without needing to have an actual lathe connected to the PC)

I thought Fusion had a generic fanuc lathe post?

Even if not it should be fairly straightforward to modify the slant-pro post to translate TXY to M6XG43Y

jcposada wrote: Even if not it should be fairly straightforward to modify the slant-pro post to translate TXY to M6XG43Y

Yes, but it isn't actually hard to modify LinuxCNC to take the T0101 format, and it's more flexible (wear offsets)
The change is 3 extra files in the config (which can be used with no modification) and a line in the INI.