Hi there
We bought a old Reichenbacher CNC gantry router from 1993. Its a 6.5 ton beast with a 9kw main spindle and a 16 position rotary tool change. It sports a Sinumerik 810M controller and bosch servos and servodrives.
Here is a thread on cnczone about it
http://www.cnczone.com/forums/commercial_cnc_wood_routers/124586-look_what_i_bought_6_a.htmlThe machine is top quality from back when they made everything to last a 100 years. The only downside is, that the controller is way outdated and we are limited to 30kb of program memory and a transfer speed of 1200 baud.
So we decided to swap the controller and mach is the choice, mainly because we can customize it and I used it on a couple of machines before. The servo drives are +-10v and the servos are "duel" encoders with one going to the servo drive and the second going to the controller.
Ive searching through a ton of information and came up with two choices Galil and dspMC/IP, im leaning towards Galil because of the more "professionel" look. Anyway, this thread are not about one vs. the other but I have a couple of questions regarding Galil:
1. Whould I gain anything from choosing the 4040 over the 4143? I will use the board only as motion/spindle control and for input of limit and home switch (24v). There are over 160 I/O, but these are going to be handled by a PLC.
2. Do I need to buy the Galiltools software to tune the axis? All I want to do is to tune the once and use Mach, no custom interface or anything.
3. Are there any advantages of PCI vs. ethernet? I could go with a 1842 or 1846 and a ICM-2900
I probably have a lot more questions, but this is it for now. Thx in advance