Igor Chudov wrote: > Chris, I actually have a Ferguson R15 rotary indexer. I have no idea > how it works, it was a good deal at auction. Do you know how those > things work, do I need special cams for each operation (number of > positions), or what? > > There are some indexers made for CNC work that have a "button" that is bumped by the CNC tool or an air cylinder to advance the indexer with a ratchet-like mechanism. Some of these just have a bolt or something that is adjusted to make it skip certain detents. But, usually, the detents are built into the unit. > Tangentially, this haas S5C has a stepper motor, how hard, practically > speaking, would be to make it work using my PC as a control, if I am > using PPMC. This would be in lieu of its original control box. > Well, the PPMC is strictly an analog-out motion interface. I did, once, a long time ago hack the original encoder card to make it into a 2-axis step pulse generator. This was how I prototyped the universal stepper controller. I can think of a couple ways to make this work. A really hideous way, that I don't actually recommend, is to use two digital outputs from the DIO board to drive step and direction to a Gecko stepper driver. This would limit you to 500 step pulses per second, and anything above that would silently lose steps -- not a good plan. You could just hook the output of the HAL stepgen module to the PPMC digital outputs. The problem is the entire PPMC is operated in a sort-of burst mode at the servo thread rate. It is not possible to break out just the DIO part for faster access due to the way the PPMC driver works. But, maybe depending on the gear ratio in the indexer, 500 steps/second would work.
The most straightforward and workable solution is to add another parallel port, and use stepgen to control that one axis through the 2nd parallel port. Finally, you could convert the Haas to use a servo motor. Depending on how it is built, this could be a drop-in replacement, or a major re-engineering hassle. Only you would know. Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
