Hi
I’m in the process of building a 10 tool carousel style tool changer for my knee mill.
I’ve reground the R-8 taper to accept BT30 tool holders and I’m using the 4 ball gripper and belleville washers for the draw bar. This is working out great.
I bought a pokeys and a M39 relay board to run things.
The carousel will be driven with a servo motor directly through Mach as the C axis but everything else is going through the pokeys.
The tool changer flies in in three steps. Down, over to engage fork into tool, down again to remove tool and clear spindle, rotate carousel, up to load new tool, back away, and up to start position. I’m putting proximity sensors at the ends of each travel. The proximity sensors will be mapped to Mach LEDs.

The way I’d like to work this is when a tool change is called up the carousel will lower to the first position, when the proximity sensor is active it will execute the next movement over, then when that sensor is active it would actuate the draw bar and release the tool, The carousel would then drop down, rotate the C axis to the next position and then reverse out.

I've done some simple macros and I've modified a few existing complex macros so I'm a little comfortable with them. I have no experience with brains though.

Thanks
Derek

You will definitely need a macro but whether you do it all in the macro or just the basics and the rest in the brain is really up to you. I do mine with a PLC and the macro just sends signals out to the PLC to tell it to do its thing then the PLC sends a signal back to the macro to say its finished and to let Mach carry on.

I think if I didnt use the PLC  I may just do it all in the macro, just the PLC makes it a lot easier for me as I can do ladders easier than VB.

Hood

Thanks hood. You confirmed what I was thinking.  Time to brush up on my macro writing!