I'm half way through retrofitting a Cincinnati VMC with a MESA m5i20 setup. I would welcome some advice as to the best way to control the spindle. My goal is to be able to do rigid tapping and fully automatic tool changes. My thoughts are that since I am planning on adding a 4th rotary axis very soon I would like to not use the remaining spare axis on the m5i20 card. So I was thinking about using one of the digital outputs via a PWM HAL component. Then filtering the output with a simple RC low pass filter to provide the analog 0-10V that the spindle drive requires. The direction control is trivial using 2 relays driven from a couple of digital outputs. I wonder would this setup provide a command signal accurate enough for rigid tapping - or would it even matter given that the spindle generates an index pulse. Incidentally the spindle also has an output that indicates when the spindle is upto the requested speed, I was wondering whether it's worth using it or whether it's overkill.
My other line of thought was to use a second m5i20 card and control the spindle with one of the servo channels. Is this feasible? Overkill? A better option? Has anyone had an experience good or bad running 2 of the m5i20 cards together in the same pc. Looking at the integration manual it looks very doable. Any real world experience would be much appreciated. So far I've got coordinated motion of the 3 axes and homing etc all sorted. Once the spindle is addressed it will be time to move onto the biggest hurdle: Automatic tool change using the 21 tool carousel. I'm planning on harvesting lots of good info from the MAZAK conversion. I welcome any comments and suggestions on the above. Also would like to say how impressed I've been with EMC and HAL so far. I've been running retrofit production machines on Mach3 for the last couple of years but have seen the light and am now in the process of converting them all over to EMC. Thankyou to all the developers who have obviously invested a huge amount of time and effort in making EMC so robust and configurable. Neil ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
