Hi,
setting up of the drives and the tuning
I think thast what stopped me fitting the minas a4 set i had to my last machine, it was all a bit too specialist
Yes, setting up servos if you've not done it before is not easy. As it turns out all AC servos are broadly similar. If you know how to set up a Yaskawa then you'll
be able to adapt that to Mitsubishi say. The trick is therefore to find a brand that you can gain that familiarity, and in my case its Delta.
I had quite a battle wiring up the first ones....now it takes under an hour. In particular I have a little comm gadget ($68USD) that you plug into the drive and your PC
to set up all the parameters. There'll be over 400 of them in most modern AC servos, so having setup software is a godsend, otherwise you have to program them
by pushing buttons like a microwave, very tedious and error prone.
You still have to make some decisions on a motion controller and breakout board. That's going to soak up a lot more money than your steppers, even if
not quite as much as a set of three servos.
Craig