124
« on: August 05, 2018, 03:47:35 AM »
Yes the drives were still available and the firmware updated through time to encompass newer motors but originally they were designed for the motors available at the time, in fact they are basically just upgrades of the Ultra 200 drives which were upgrades of the ultra 100 drives which in turn were upgrades of DM drives. I have a few DM drives here although Osai branded rather than AB, then again the original makers were Electrocraft and I think AB eventually bought them out. That was probably why Giddings and Lewis stopped selling the Centurian drives as they were just rebranded ElectroCraft DDM and DSD drives. One of the 030 drives on my lathe is actually a G&L Centurion.
BTW the DSD drives are very adaptable beasts, I have a few motors running on them that were originally resolver motors, all I had to do was find a suitable encoder for them and then set up a custom motor profile.
My manual lathe uses such a beast, the motor is a 1326AB-A520E and the encoder is from an N series motor (same pole count) so it was ideal. The 1326 motors were meant for 1391 drives. The drive on the manual lathe however is an older DDM-075. They are similar drives but you can only have one custom motor in the database at a time, you have to overwrite it if you want a different one, the DSD drives allow as many custom motors as you like.
You do not even have to have commutation signals on the encoders as they will self sense on start but the drawback is when you power up the drives the motor will rotate slowly approx 1/4 turn to sense the commutation so it is not the ideal situation in a lot of setups. It would have been fine for my manual lathe but if I recall the DDM drives do not have self sense.