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Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Thinking of doing a lathe build and need some basic questions answered.

« on: December 15, 2022, 12:58:58 PM »

Thanks Craig, good information. The drives are posted on ebay (lol)

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Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Thinking of doing a lathe build and need some basic questions answered.

« on: December 14, 2022, 09:38:01 PM »

No, Craig. Unfortunately it does not. Yaskawa is acting rather stubborn on this issue. They want me to go out and purchase a "controller" that would manage the drives via the METCHATROLINK connections. 

It's looking like my best option is to sell the drives and replace them with the version that is pulse compatible. Pity, these drives are all over the place used and have lots of "brains" to them.

The MECHATROLINK route, I am surprised it's not been done already. The SDK route does not bother me as I have been a software developer for decades and supposedly, MECHATROLINK is open source.

You mentioned something that confused me (easy to do!). You state that "Mach4 is the trajectory planner and posts numeric data describing the position of the controlled point in 1 millisecond time slices." ....IE, timed. Granted any pc running winders can interrupt that timing at any time but given that an instruction set sent in that millisecond might be in the form "move X 3 steps and Y one" (with the expectation said move will be completed within that millisecond or instructions would be dropped.). This all implies "hand shaking" of some sort. The controller would need to send "complete" to Mach before another set of date is sent. An interruption at that point would not crash a machine. It would just wait for the next instruction.   Lots of interruptions would equal some really odd R2D2 noises when cutting a curve to say the least.  Given, that frequency is not adequate to mange the level of detail the motors require but it is plenty fast enough to send commands via MECHATROLINK or via plugin to some other controller and letting the servo drive handle the details I would think. I am only beginning to analyze MECHATROLINK so it may be more involved but the papers published about it suggest that is the concept behind it.

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Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Thinking of doing a lathe build and need some basic questions answered.

« on: December 14, 2022, 01:41:17 PM »

Thank you Craig, that was put in a way that made sense to me. Unfortunately, my series of drives have no interface for pulse inputs. Yaskawa used something called MECHATROLINK that communicates over a form of RS485. My drives can also be controlled via a USB port using a program Yaskawa calls SigmaWinPlus but so far Yaskawa doesn't want to talk about that saying SigmaWinPlus is only for testing. Frustrating because I have it hooked up on my work bench and using that program my pc can make that servo do all kinds of cool tricks. It looks like it would take quite a bit on my part to add an RS485 interface to my pc and write code (a plugin) for Mach. So far, no response from ArtSoft about obtaining the SDK. Trying to reverse engineer the USB protocol even worse.

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Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Thinking of doing a lathe build and need some basic questions answered.

« on: December 13, 2022, 10:54:59 PM »

I guess perhaps I might word my question differently. Suppose I ask Mach to execute a G code (G3) to cut a circle. This requires varying the rate and position of the X and Y axis on a mill. Old school parallel port - a pin was set indicating direction and a series of pulses or "steps" are then sent at a varying rate describing the motion of that particular axis. Meanwhile, the second axis is sent similar information simultaneously and coordinated with the first axis controlled by it's own set of like pins on the parallel port. Mach was in charge of the pins. Mach, pulse by pulse decided how often, when and how far each axis moved.

Now given a servo rather than steppers. They receive commands such as positioning, constant speed, constant torque, home. Mach4 no longer uses the parallel port but some intermediate software they call a "plugin". While steppers are more of a digital device (step or don't), servos are analog (move this way, this fast, that far, let me know when your done).

I have Yaskawa Sigma5 drives and servos. The drives are quite smart and handle all tasks of making sure the motor is where and when it's supposed to be. ....via commands. I see nothing that will marry up Mach to these drives nor any way to create something that does (software/hardware).   

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Mach4 General Discussion / Thinking of doing a lathe build and need some basic questions answered.

« on: December 09, 2022, 12:17:20 AM »

It's a bit confusing trying to figure out what Mach4 will and won't do. My goal is to control the new lathe well enough that it can thread accurately granting any physical stability will play into accuracy but if the control system is accurate then I can work on the physical. My thoughts on threading is that Mach4 would have to know where the spindle is as well as where the X and Z axis are. I have searched the forum and find conflicting information so here I am. The forum seems to indicate Mach4 will perform threading and second Mach4 can use my Yaskawa Sigma V servo drives but for the life of me how? The servo drives can be controlled three ways from what I read. Via Mechatrolink, Analog voltage and pulse train reference, and via USB connection (I have played with this a tad using Yaskawa's SigmaWinPlus). So how do I get Mach4 to perform one of these protocols? Next, one would think an optical encoder would be needed on the spindle. How to get Mach4 to read the encoder?

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Galil / Re: Galil controller compatability (what works with the plugin)

« on: September 24, 2019, 04:27:20 PM »

The manual for the Galil DMC-4080 describes how the device handles RS-485 packets and has the ability to communicate using this protocol. Does Mach4 and the Galil plug in support RS-485 via the DMC?