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
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