I could also use a copy of the SD manual. I have a set of these drives in a Marvin Mill.

ashburn(at)icx(dot)net

Thanks in advance,
Darek

Hood
I appreciate all your help. I think I got myself cOnfused. I researched all of those sites especially Teknix and Rutex. Did I miss something, It looked like all they would handle is 80 VDC. I know I can use this but not at full speed. If I dont find something at 100VDC, then that will be the way to go and I probably will wont to try your board(thanks for permitting me to try it). My question that I still dont UNDERSTAND. Can I use my driver boards and Baldor servo with the 1000 count encoder. I am far from your knowledge of this type retrofit, but my drive to learn is burning and I dont want to get hasty and jump when I should be walking (well at my age crawling). You all's knowledge is far superior to mine and I am trying to take each input and put it together, so please don misunderstand my not understanding everything offered. This is what makes this and other forumn unbelivably nice to read. People want to help. I hope one day you people that have helped me will enter into my area of expertise and I can return that favor and help you. Do you all need information on how to build race car engines? I can help you on that. Or I can help you build golf clubs or I can help you build PC's but I gots to learn from you all on this data as I am finding my lack of knowledge is a humbling experience. The lady of the house already said I was a dumb s--t and now I'm beginning to believe she is correct. Yall got to help me show her up. HeHeHe.
thanks yun zees
racear

racear
First off you just have to look through my lathe thread to see how much I knew about servo motors a year or so ago, absolutely nothing. Still dont know a great deal but like you I like to learn

Ok think the best thing is to describe firstly how your present system works. This is a bit oversimplified but it will suffice, your control (computer) sends out a voltage to your servodrives which in turn send out voltage to your motors to make them turn. Your control has feedback from the encoders so it knows where the motors are and so can control the voltage to get the motors to the position it wants to get them to.

Now Mach works differently, it sends out pulses to the drives which will determine how far the drive will tell the motor to go and also at what speed.

So as you can see what you need to make Mach work with your Drives/motors is a device that will accept Step/Dir pulses and convert them to a suitable voltage to send to your drives so that the drives make the motors move. This board also has to accept the feedback from your motors so that it knows your motors got to where they are supposed to be, if not then they will fault out and tell Mach.

I have a had a look at Rutex site and cant find any mention of their converters so looks like they dont sell them any more, in fact I dont know if they ever have, I know they did have them on their site a while back as I saw mention of them but maybe they have never actually had any and were just planning on making them.

 As for CNCTeknix, they reportedly were planning on making dedicated converters but again there is no mention on their site but it may be worth an email to them to see if they still have plans to make them.
 As mentioned I have the top boards from their Tek10 servo drives, the top boards are the brain part of the drives and as said previously they are supposed to be able to take Step/Dir and turn it into a +- 10v signal and my initial tests seemed to verify that they did that.

Ok next thing is the encoders, you have 1000 counts per rev, now that means it is 4000 pulses per rev as far as Mach is concerned  so say for instance your motors need to turn 5 times to move your table 1 inch, that means mach needs to send 20,000 pulses out. If you use the parallel port you should be able to get 45KHz kernel speed, maybe more but I will calculate on that figure. So 45KHz means Mach can send out 45,000 pulses per second (per axis) so 45,000/20,000= 2.25 inches per second max speed which is obviously 2.25 x 60 = 135IPM which will be the max speed you could achieve. If you could get a faster kernel speed reliably then obviously you will get faster rapid speeds (up to the max of your motor capabilities) but whether you will get these kernel speeds will depend on your individual computer.
 Ok so say you can only get 45KHz kernel  speed from your computer but your motors are capable of going faster and you want faster you would need to get other encoders with a lower count so that the amount of pulses required to move 1 inch is less and thus the 45KHz pulse frequency will move your motors faster. For instance if you got encoders with 500 counts then that would double your rapid speed as it would mean only 10,000 pulses were needed to move 1 inch. This obviously affects your resolution as with 1000 count encoders and 5 turns per inch your theoretical resolution would be 1/20,000= 0.00005 inches but a 500 count encoder would just mean 1/10,000 = 0.0001 which is still pretty good I suppose.
Another option is to use a SmoothStepper motion controller, it takes the place of the parallel port and talks to Mach over USB and is capable of a 4MHz puls rate so no problems there with not being able to get your motors  to their max speed I have SmoothSteppers on all my machines so can highly recommend them.

Ok so how to proceed, best option I would say is the DSPMC as it would take the info from Mach and then send the info to your servo drives to control your motors, problem is its also not the cheapest option.

 Next best I think would be if you could get a converter board so Mach sends the signals to it and the board then sends the required voltage to your drives to move your motors.

If you cant get that then the next option would be to replace the drives with something like the Geckos or the Tek10's but as has been said then you would lose speed as they are not capable of the voltage that your motors can use. Rutex do higher voltage/current drives than the others but there have been a lot of bad reports as well as good reports and as I have never tried them I cant say whether they are the way to go or not.

If there is anything you are unclear about just shout, if I know the answer I will do my best to explain or I am sure others will jump in and do so.

Hood

Hood
You just made it so simple that even I can understand it. I already have the Smoothstepper and Pokeys. And I was looking at the drive board pdf from Vince and I was trying to see if I could get step and direction and if it was digital or analog and then 3 of the Grand Kids came over and wanted to play pool. So that shot the rest of the nite. Will look at that file again tonight.
thanks
racear

Not looked at the pdf properly yet but afraid I think the drives you have are purely analogue

Hood

Ok just had another squint at it and its definitely just analogue input however an interesting thing is the max and also continuous voltage, its 100V and 92v respectively. That to me would suggest that your machine is probably only running the motors at 90V so the 10 or so drop to Geckos or Teknix drives may not be as large a drop as we thought

Hood

Hood,

Could you send me a copy of that PDF?

Darek

yep, no probs, its on its way Dont think Vince will mind but if he does then afraid its too late

Hood

Hey Yall
I just had another guy call me to get a copy of the pdf file. He has a machine with these same drives and wants to do the same thing with Mach. I told him how to sign and join here. I hope Vince you dont mind us sending this drive pdf file. I again looked at the drive and it does appear to be analog (I think). Is there no ways to convert the signal from digital to analog or am I just better off to bite that bullet and go with other drives and move on. Since the spindle is just variable speed, this would be the time to go VFD also. Heck I really must want to learn. Hood, my head want hold no more. Yo dis is fun.
racear

I could also use a copy of the SD manual. I have a set of these drives in a Marvin Mill.

ashburn(at)icx(dot)net

Thanks in advance,
Darek

You guys get too much done while I am at work.  I sent the PDF to you Darek just now if you had not already received it.  Feel free to pass it around, it is  not copy written. 

I have done 5 CNC conversions, 3 with servos.  Up to now only DC brushed servos.  Two have been with Gecko 320's, the 3rd with the Servo Dynamics drives driven from a Pixie board.  Even though the SD drives are old and analog only, they really rock compared to the Gecko drives.  Much higher speeds and faster acceleration.   After reading some of the stuff Hood has posted, 3 phase AC drives look much more doable.   I did one conversion with steppers on a Taig lathe and they really suck compared to servos.  Mariss at Gecko has no interest in larger amperage drives or anything higher than 80V.  That really limits the CNC conversion/retrofits for Geckos to smaller machines.  Some of the larger machines are actually cheaper to buy as the market is so much smaller for them.

Hood, sorry to hijack your thread.

Vince