Lloyd, I have done a couple retrofits on Technos and it was not too bad if you have the modular amplifier box (up to four amplifiers in the box with a 68 pin Centronix connector on the back). I seem to recall that on a standard Centronix cable, there is one pin that does not go through, and it ends up mapping to one of the pins for Axis #4. Since I only had three axes, this did not affect me, but it is something to look out for.
Mostly the connections are obvious and straight forward, except the 3 enable signals which were not well documented. A call to Techno resolved that. I also recall that the smallest motors available for the 4' x 8' table (350 Watt IIRC) were a real PITA to tune, but the larger motors (550 Watt) were a piece of cake. I also recall having a minor issue with the Z axis brake but do not recall what that was. If it has a tool changer, that can be a bit of a PITA too as it uses a spice rack style tool changer and a special module for the tool changer. The main thing that the tool change module has is a spindle speed detector which will assert a signal when the spindle speed is below the safe threshold for performing a tool change. The standard drive for the spindle is a TECO Fluxmaster which is also quite straight forward as far as interfacing. If you want analog velocity control over the spindle, you will need 5 analog (+/- 10V) outputs, which may affect what control hardware you choose to use. I used the Mesa 5i30 + one 7i33 quad analog servo module, however I had three axes plus spindle so could handle all of the analogs on a single 50 pin connector. I don't see any issue with Mastercam or any other package. What minor differences may exist in G-Code between Techno and EMC can be handled in the post. Regards, Eric My son runs a Techno router (4 axis) in his business and may need to upgrade the the controller. We are curious if anyone has done a retrofit of one of these machines to emc, and what, if any, are pitfalls to beware of. He uses MasterCam, version X5 to generate the router files. The wiki references a m'cam 9 post; has anyone created a postprocessor for MasterCam X* to produce emc-compatible G-code? Thanks to all the emc community; it's a model for how open-source development can produce excellent results. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
