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.

This is what I came up with. I can easily send 240V single phase on a 30amp circuit. That plus a 750kvA 32V boost guarded by a 30amp breaker on 10AWG should supply me with enough power for all the drives as they are right now. That's $200bucks for the transformer plus some scrap wire lying around. I want to get the movement of the machine sorted out while the swivel head takes its time to get here on a boat. I believe I'll need an analog mesa card for this setup. The swivel head will have Yaskawa brushless servos. For these, and the rotaries, I will just run them on step/dir drivers. They can be another 20amp 220V circuit. That leaves me with 30amp - 40amp 220 single phase to feed a spindle. Thats a 6-hp spindle - much more than I need. I'll run the raspi off a power bank in case it overloads the system. 

Thanks for reminding me to do this first. This was important. It would have been silly to work on other things not knowing if I could power it all up. Taking apart the control box next. I've confirmed the Fagor controller is working, and that means I can put it on FB marketplace.

RTAI? isn't your lathe using a Mesa card?
Why RTAI?

andrax wrote:

Have you tested the module in Twincat yet?
If it runs without any issues there, you could use Wireshark to monitor the communication. Maybe that will turn something up.

I do not use Windows here! 
Well I sometimes did until this last week dual booting to run Anycubic Slicer Next for my 3D printer but now I have it working under Linux so I am never booting into Windows again just to be beseiged with ads. 

Thanks Andy, I'll test that tomorrow to see if it happens in other screens.

Yeah, you warned me.

After I tried to update 2.8.2 I screwed something up, and decided I may as well then pull the SSD and do a clean install. 
If this is not easily fixible, I guess I could do a clean install of 2.8. and wheezy.
Cheers,
Mark

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.

Hi Guys,

I updated my lathe to 2.9.8 on Trixie with Preemt-RT. Now Gmoccapy appears to have a bug causing it to scale up each time you exit the tool table or the max preview. window size setting also doesn't work correctly, as the screen reduces in height when commanded to increase in either width or height.

I made a video to show the behavior. 


Like this, the lathe is nearly unusable, as I have to keep shutting down and restarting LinuxCNC to reset it. Any suggestions how to correct this greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Mark

Thanks for that, I was not able to get into the forum for the last couple of days.

I had similar advice from AI, and tried both the solution yours and mine gave and it has not corrected it.

I even used visual code studio, and rewrote the whole program be hand, to ensure there were no secret character codes in there. (See attached file)But the result is still the same.
hal:turret:1: character unknown '  '

Any other suggestions much appreciated. 
Cheers,
Mark

spumco wrote:

Before you make any decisions, you've got to sort out power
 

THat's what I did today:
The VFD takes 480V directly from source (I am going to replace VFD and spindle, so it doesn't matter).
A 480V single phase line powers the DC bus which in turn supplies power to all 4 drives.
The transformer ties two of the lines into a neutral-ground, and outputs 120V to power the controller and peripherals. I replaced this with 120V AC to test if the controllers are working. Was told by seller that it takes a while to boot. It's abootin as I write this.

The servos are all 140V 65amp max. I do not need the maximum capacity (I am carving wood, and I am doing low throughput. I was thinking to sell the drives (they are out of production and I imagine someone who is running this machine in a production setting would want parts) and replace them with step/dir ones as someone else had recommended. The VFD takes 3 phase power at 360 to 480. I was wondering if I could just supply 220V power 3 phase to the VFD and have it power a 220V 3 phase spindle. This would make the work a lot easier, or just replace it with a single phase 220V VFD to power a 4ish HP spindle. That would work too. Either way, I really don't see why I should stick to 480V single phase since the part that is drawing power is the spindle which I really do not need.

placeholder