Hi all, I have been pondering a possible CNC shaper project for a while now. I have some chinese AC servos lying around and have pondered CNC on my little Atlas 7B metal shaper. I have a production application for this, so it's not entirely a fanciful project. The current solution involves CNC shaping/broaching on a Haas mill using their built-in broaching canned cycle ( https://www.haascnc.com/service/codes-settings.type=gcode.machine=mill.value=G156.html). This works fine, but it's preferable to do this operation on a different machine to reduce operator loading time. Nonetheless, it may not be worth the time to implement, but I'm just pondering at this stage.
The general concept is to put an encoder on the bull gear (which has fixed timing with respect to the stroke of the ram), use a large servo as the drive motor (although a VFD & 3 phase motor would also work, but this allows easy positioning of the ram and I already have a servo with ample power and torque). Then an additional servo can be used for down feed and cross feed (i.e. X and Y motion). Stroke position and stroke length can be adjusted manually as per usual shaper operation. The servos can be operated in step and direction mode or velocity/torque mode with analog inputs. The drives also provide encoder output which I would like to provide to LinuxCNC. I have two main questions. 1) if looking at Mesa hardware, what would be the optimal cards for 3 AC servos with encoder feedback? Some minimal I/O is also required, but I don't expect this to be substantial. I haven't used Mesa hardware before but would like to give it a try. 2) Is it possible to only advance (down-feed or cross-feed) the cut during a certain portion of the rotation of the bull gear? Shapers typically feed on the return stroke and I would prefer to maintain this. Thanks! Matt -- Matthew Herd Email: herd.m...@gmail.com Cell: 610-608-8930 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
