G'Day Friends
On my lathe I have finally got an AC servo to be used as my spindle, big learning curve here and lots of little pitfalls but the majority have been solved, thanks to the help of our wonderful members out there.
What I am trying to do at the moment is use the servo as not only a spindle but a "C" Axis, this is not a complex thing and I have assigned all the correct settings in Mach3 to do this, If I call C to move 50deg it does so, as C is rotational drive across Z. Normal use is as spindle and you can easily call up from 0-2000rpm quite happily. This really is a good thing and works very well on the lathe, disposes all of the changing of pulleys and simply just gives absolute control.
Now my issue begins. The servo is controlled by Step/Dir for both Axis or Spindle, the only way I can make this work is to use the same pins for both and simply disable or enable the one I want to use, no great concern but things can be better. So I assigned 2 different pins for each . EG. Spindle use Step pin1 Dir Pin14 C axis uses Step pin16 Dir pin17 all off port 1. Then the cabling from pin1 and pin16 both feed Step pin on the AC Servo Drive as do Pin14 and Pin17 connect to Dir on the Servo Drive. When I do this neither work. If I disconnect one set, does not matter which one, then axis or spindle works fine. I thought that it might be back feeding into the other pins so I put a diode on each cable to stop any back feed, but this did not work and with the diode in place I cannot get movement at all from either set. The diode is setup so the + side is to the Servo Drive the Negative side to Mach.
For those that have more knowledge in Electronics than me is this a waste of time to use the 4 pins or am I simply missing something simple?
Thanks for reding