Topics

21

General Mach Discussion / Lockdown (066) and Dev (067) versions, issues

« on: February 27, 2013, 10:41:10 AM »

Just a warning that the two versions above may  cause problems and personally I would not use them.
The problems include

In Mill, possibly Turn as well

macros not being fully run,
VB Buttons being totally ignored

In Turn

X Wear Offset DRO will double the entry you enter.
DROs often wont accept an entry you make
Also had reports of
threading not working when using the parallel port
Axis ignoring home switches and crashing into end of travels.

I have gone back to 057 on lathe and 056 on mill.

Hood

22

General Mach Discussion / Dolphin Lathe tool dra files

« on: January 12, 2013, 06:22:55 AM »

I am currently making up some lathe tool DRA files for Dolphin Turn to use in the simulations, if anyone is interested in them I can attach.
They are metric tools with different nose rads in each style, so far I have
SVJB 2020 in 0.2, 0.4, 0.8 and 1.2 nose rads
PDJN  2020 in 0.4, 0.8 and 1.2 nose rads
PCLN 2020 in  0.4, 0.8 and 1.2 nose rads

Although these are metric designations they should also work fine for imperial people, they will just have to  convert the nose rads to know what to choose.
Hood

23

CS-Lab / Helping a friend set up his CSMIO/IP-S

« on: November 18, 2012, 07:28:44 AM »

Was through at a friends (Forbes) yesterday helping him set up his lathe, originally it was going to have an ESS on it but the CSMIO started to look like it might be a suitable candidate for a lathe so I persuaded him to give it a try and we purchased one each around about the same time
Anyway most of the day yesterday was taken up with connecting the PLC, tweaking the ladder and writing the macro all for the 8 position turret, got all that done and then moved on to the other parts that were controlled directly from the CSMIO.
Spindle was first, it was controlled via a VFD but driven through the lathes gearbox. We were unsure of the encoder counts as there was no info on the net about the encoder that was fitted but after a while we worked out it was 1250 counts so got the spindle running nicely via the CSMIO, The speed wasnt correct as the VFD was set to 50Hz max and we didnt have time to change that. The gear it was in was labeled 1300rpm and the max RPM he wants is 2000rpm so all he has to do now is to alter the VFD to have a Max Hz of approx 77Hz and it should work out fine. Spindle control speed was very linear so I am confident when he reads the VFD manual and gets the Hz set  it will work out exactly right
Next we moved on to  getting the axis to move, couldnt seem to get any motion at all when trying to jog and went through checking the wiring which all seemed correct. I then decided to command a move from MDI and low and behold a message popped up telling me as I had not referenced the machine I either had to do that or disable the softlimits. I disabled the limits and jogging started working. This is a nice feature, shame it took me so long to work out what the problem was. We had the default lathe screen loaded and I am not a fan and am not used to it so likely we would have found the issue a lot quicker if I had taken a copy of my own screenset through as I am used to its layout.
 Sadly we didnt have time to get the motors tuned or get the MPG and axis selections switches connected up properly but we did manage to get the FRO and SRO  pots hooked up and configured and they work nicely.
 All in all I am very impressed with the CSMIO so far, hopefully I will get a chance to do a bit more to my own wee lathe soon and will get more experience with the CSMIO but so far everything I have seen about it I am liking

One other thing I noticed yesterday is in the latest plugin there seems to be an option to use an axis up for Step/Dir spindle, this is something I had wanted a while back and had been told it would be done at some point, looks like it has now, will likely test it out on my lathe as it makes it easier for me to connect my spindles servo drive. I do have it connected via the analogue output at the moment and it works well but I had to make up a relay board to flip the analogue voltage for M4 rotation, with the Step/Dir I can do away with that

Hopefully Forbes will post a few pics of his setup here to show the CSMIO in his lathe.

Hood

24

CS-Lab / Question for TechCNC

« on: October 19, 2012, 05:45:06 PM »

Hi Andrew, I was wondering if there was a feature or will be in the future, in the CSMIO/IP-A to do Index homing on amplifiers that do not support it?
Most of the drives/amplifiers that would be used in a retrofit with the CSMIO/IP-A would, I imagine, be of the dumb kind, in other words it would have been the control that referenced the machine and set the machine coords when the switch, then index, was seen. As the CSMIO/IP-A already has the encoder inputs it should be possible to do this I would imagine?
Hood

25

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Chiron FZ12 on its way sometime soon(ish)

« on: September 23, 2012, 02:47:11 PM »

I have just been through to see a Chiron FZ12 that I was thinking of buying. It is a fairly large footprint machine but travels are not huge, in fact its not much bigger than the Bridgeport Boss's travels. It however is a much sturdier machine weighing in somewhere around 3 or 4 tonnes.
 The basket toolchanger is going to be great and another nice thing is the table does not move at all as it is a travelling column mill. This means it is very easy to load/unload as the table is always at the front just behind the doors, or rather where the doors fit as they are not n it at the moment.
 It is linear rail on all axis and it moves very freely and smooth and with very little effort. The motors that are on it (I am not taking them) are Siemens 1FT5064-OAG which are 4000rpm and 3.8Nm torque continuous which gave a rapid of 20m/min. I have some motors I recently fitted to my Bridgeport which I may use, they are a bit lower on torque (3.05Nm) but they are 5000rpm so I can likely gear them 2.5:1 instead of the 2:1 now and that would increase the torque to be almost identical.
I may however decide to put some Allen Bradley F-4030 motors on instead, in fact I will have to put one of these on the Z as it needs a brake and the F-4030 is the only one I have with a brake. The reason I may choose the 4030 motors is I have some Osai drives here that I would like to use but they can only use certain motors and the wee MPL motors are not ones I can use.
 I plan to use a CSMIO/IP controller on this and I am thinking I may go for the analogue one as no matter which drives I end up using they are all capable of analogue input, if I decided to go with the Step/Dir CSMIO then I would be limited  to the more modern drives.

Couple of pics, looks a bit scrappy but a clean up and paint and I am sure it will look great, the basket toolchanger has a cover and also all the tinwork for the side is there.


So all I need to do now is get rid of the Bridgeport and one of my manual lathes so that I can reorganise my workshop and fit this in
Hood

26

CS-Lab / First impressions of CS-Lab products

« on: August 23, 2012, 10:58:41 AM »

I purchased a CSMIO/IP-S, a CSMIO/MPG, CSMIO/Enc and a CSMIO/IO from CS-Lab a week or so ago and first impressions are very good.

I first saw the CSMIO range of products a year or so ago and liked the look of the specifications of them as they seemed to be aimed more at the industrial end of the market.
The things that I liked were that the I/O were 24v which is much more noise immune and is the Industry standard. There are also Analogue Inputs and Outputs for such things as spindle control, Feed and Spindle override pots etc. The Step/Dir signals are also differential which again is very noise immune and it is something I have used on my machines but have had to make up my own line drivers up until now. It also communicates via Ethernet which again is very robust.

To save me typing out the specs here is a link
http://www.cs-lab.eu/en/index.php?m=gallery&s=show&fid=48&sort=&uinfo=CSMIOIPS_6_axis_CNC_Ethernet_Motion_Controller_STEPDIR

I am using this on a small lathe I am retrofitting at the moment, its probably a bit overkill for the wee lathe but I wanted to test it out and see if it lived up to the impressive specifications before I put it on the big lathe. As said first impressions are good, I am just at the wiring up stage but have been testing things out as I go.
The modules are all designed to fit on din rails which  makes things very neat and easy to mount. The IP/S, IO and Enc come with breakout boards and ribbon cables which again are din rail mounted.

I will post later on with what I have tested so far and my thoughts.
Hood

27

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Eventually getting started on a 4th axis

« on: June 23, 2012, 06:57:00 PM »

I bought a Bristol 800 Indexer from eBay about 6 or more years ago in the hopes of making a full 4th axis from it. Its a lump of an indexer weighing in at 90Kg without a chuck, the centre height is 165mm and I also got the tailstock with it. The problem with it was, being an indexer, there was a bit of backlash in the worm/gear and there was no adjustment. I had several ideas about how I would convert it including using a belt and pulley, or making up some offset mountings for the worm.
Problem with the belt system was no easy way to get things mounted so I could use as a vertical indexer/axis.
Problem with the offset mounts was it would need the hole enlarged and getting the two lined up accurately would mean I really needed to line bore it or make up a long boring head. I had thought of mounting it on the cross slide of the lathe and make a boring bar held in the chuck and tailstock and bore that way but it would be a pain.
Anyway it got shoved in the shed outside my workshop and forgotten about until I bought a servo motor and drive from eBay the last day and decided to look at it again as they would be a perfect fit.
 This time I wondered about mounting the worm over the wheel so with my usual planning (None whatsoever ) I threw ( actually puffed and groaned more than throwing ) it on the mill and cut out the top of the housing. This is as far as I have got but I am hoping I will get some time in the next week or two to get a housing made up for the worm so I can bolt it down nice and snug onto the wheel, good thing is if I screw up and take too much off the housing bottom I can always shim it a bit

Hood

28

PoKeys / Pokeys tests

« on: January 09, 2012, 05:14:43 AM »

I have been testing the PoKeys 56E's encoder inputs with the new plugin that Brian is at this time developing.
I have been very impressed so far
I have one of the encoder inputs connected to the buffered encoder outputs on a servo drive which has a 4000rpm motor with 2000line (8000ppr) encoder. At full speed that equates to 533KHz. I have not lost a single count even when running the motor at full speed over a period of hours with frequent  reversals at 1000 revs/s/s acceleration set.

This opens great possibilities to me, it means I can basically have encoder feedback to Mach which could be monitored for position errors if wanted but what I really am looking forward to is being able to reference the machine once when I start Mach, it could actually just be done once and never again unless 56U and encoder are powered down but I will personally home on each start of Mach. This means if I E-Stop or Disable/Enable drives I could have a message pop up to ask if I want to update Machs machine coords to the encoder position if it is different. This is great for me as all axis will lose position to some point when an E-Stop situation has occurred or drives are disabled. Even steppers will lose position if they are disabled as they will jump to the nearest full step. With encoder feedback Mach would know and allow you to update if you choose.

Another possibility is to have encoder index homing which will be very accurate. Currently I do this external to Mach in my servo drives but being able to do it inside of Mach means that servo drives without this capability or even steppers could be homed to an index pulse as long as you have an encoder fitted.

So in short as long as the standby power to my servo drives logic and the power to the pokeys is kept alive the actual axis position will always be known by mach when it starts and can be updated if required

Hood

29

SmoothStepper USB / Ethernet SmoothStepper first test

« on: November 16, 2011, 11:26:31 AM »

Got an Ethernet SmoothStepper  (ESS) the other day from Greg to test out. I messed about with it a bit at home and all seemed fine so today I had a chance to fit it to one of my machines. I decided on the lathe for two reasons, first is lathes will be in a minority of users and secondly I only had one wire to shift.
The reason I needed to shift a wire at all is that the ESS has port 3 similar to ports 1 and 2 and not like the USB SS with only 6 inputs (3 being differential which Iwill  miss   ) But the extra I/O of a full port I am sure will be welcomed by most.
Ok so got it set up in no time, all seemed to work fine on a dry run so decided to cut a part I have been doing recently, its a lid for an aluminium housing for use in the North Sea attached to mini subs.
It is 70mm OD and the thread is 60mm x 1.5 pitch and hole inside is 45mm ID 44mm deep.
Came out perfect so I was happy.
Will be testing a bit more in the next few days but not expecting any issues

Hood

30

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Conect 121 lathe retro

« on: August 19, 2011, 08:15:55 PM »

Just got a wee lathe yesterday, have been looking for one for a while just to play around with and got talking to Graham Waterworth and he mentioned he had one so I bought it

Its based on a Myford ML10 and had a 1/2HP DC motor on the spindle and a couple of steppers for X and Z axis. I have stripped things down a bit and have replaced the spindle motor with a 1HP AC servo I had lying around. I have a 400w AC servo for the Z axis and I am hoping to pick up a 100w or 200w one for the X.

At the moment the motor on X sticks out the front but I am hoping I can redo things so it sticks out the back, time will tell if thats going to be easy or not.
The toolpost is a Dickson quick change but I am thinking of doing a gang tool setup at the moment and maybe in the future I will make a turret.

Anyway heres a few pics of the lathe as was , the lasttwo are the original spindle motor and the servo I have fitted.