Over the last couple of weeks we have made some decent progress;
We installed a driver for the Contec card that included a diagnostic program, allowing us to manually toggle the relays on the Opto-22 board.
This has allowed all the axis amplifiers to switch on and be controlled by the Galil board, and seems to be a good way to get everything going until we write a macro in Mach.
Using SmartTerm we were able to tune the axis motors (setting KD, KP and KI). The X axis seemed to work without tuning, but it was required to make the Y and Z axes move.
After tuning, we seem to be able to make all the motors move in all directions, with full control of speed, acceleration etc.
We used a pdf on Galil's website to do this, increasing KD until the error became unstable, then KP, then KI.
However, we still have yet to iron out some problems:
When first turning on the machine and switching the X axis relay through the Contec program, the X axis runs away. If you switch the relay off and back on, it then runs away in the opposite direction. If you then toggle it a third time it will settle down. Before tuning the Z axis, it would also do this, however after tuning it does not seem to do it anymore.
When tuning the Z and Y axis, we could considerably increase KD and KP, to 1000 and 80 for Z, and 1000 and 40 for Y, without the servo vibrating. With the X axis, KD and KP could only be set to 100 and 5 (Galils recommended minimum settings to start tuning are 100 and 5), and was still less stable than the other two axis. Increasing KI to 1 made all axes unstable.
Also, is tuning in Galil a waste of time, should we just be doing this later in Mach?
When using SmartTerm to issue a move command to all three axis at once (PR 5000 and BG), at one stage the Z axis moved the wrong direction, and another time it ran away alltogether. All other times, once the machine has been safely powered up everything is fairly reliable.
When starting Mach with power to the servos, all servos run away. Perhaps they are trying to home or something similar?
Apart from that, I think we are definitely on the right track anyhow.