Morning Gang!
First a little background-
I have been using Mach for about 10-11 years. Started with 2 and have been using 3 for as long as I can remember.
I have retrofit a Bridgeport series 1, a Tree 425 mill (4 axis) and a few routers for friends over the years.
At this time I am just wrapping up a Monarch 10ee lathe CNC conversion. I have an unmodified 10ee as well.
My CNC 10ee is from 1955, and was originally an "air tracer machine" so it was special enough to not be useful as a standard manual lathe anymore, and thus I did not have any qualms converting a 10ee.
The 10ee is set up as follows-
*7.5 baldor VFD and 7.5 Hp 1750 motor. Geared approximately 3:1, so the spindle runs about 1/3 of motor speed. Motor and spindle coupled with a large timing belt. No slip under heavy cuts, but noisy with this belt. Seems this motor has lots of torque. spindle tach never deviated more than 2 rpm when under cutting conditions. So far I am happy with 7.5hp.
*Orig spindle oiler setup destroyed, so I have installed a small pump for constant oiling.
*Steppers on X and Z, 890ozin motors, running G214r geckodrives
*Ethernet SS
*C25 BOB
*CXX spindle pulse board. one notch in wheel, approx 1/4 of disk perimeter. so far signal is very stable. as far as i can tell.
*limit and home switches.
*full compliment of contactors, relays etc for controlling accessories, drive power, SS power, Coolant etc.
*all power supplies 70VDC, 12VDC, 24VDC, etc are activated by relays and contactors such that they are all individually controllable and all items are fused.
*standard dell pc tower running mach3.
*20HP cnc capable Rotary convertor supplying 3 ph to the VFD drive.
So far I am very happy with the conversion, but I am only a few cuts into using it.
I did have a Hardinge CHNC I had converted years ago, but sold it to fund the 10ee conversion, so it is not my first rodeo with a mach3 controlled lathe.
So... on to my real issues, now that I have provided some background.
I have a delta ASDA-B2 drive with a matched 750W servo motor. Encoder believed to be 17bit, biut not enumerated on the motor so I really am not sure. I do not have the delta tuning software, acc keypad or connector cable to use the software tuning.
I have been able to apply 3ph to the delta drive and then also power the two seperate control circut power leads. Pulled from 3 ph.
Servo drive powers up with no faults, and after adjusting parameter 2-30 to 1, I am able to enter Jog mode and get full 3k rpm of servo when jog is commanded. CW and CCW both work.
Although I can get the Delta drive to operate correctly in Jog, running it with Mach3 is another thing.
I have been able to get the ASDA-B2 to respond (correctly) to step and direction (Sign and Pulse according to Delta manual) however, the motor (despite tuning everything I could find in drive and mach and SS configurations, to no avail. I am only able to get the motor running at about 4rpm. No matter what I do I cannot seem to get the servo to run at a reasonable (usable) speed.
I have been doing a lot of reading (spent 12hrs working on this yesterday) and as far as I can tell, Mach3 may not be sending the correct pulse train through the ESS, into the C10BOB and into the Delta Drive.
I did check to make sure that my BOB is outputting a full 5vdc+ to the delta drive. I understand that the Delta drive wants Differential signals for Sign and Pulse. Mach does not do this, and this may be my issue. I have ordered Differential Line Driver from CNC4PC, hopefully will have them by the end of the week.
Another possibility is that the electronic gearing in the ASDA-2B is set incorrectly. I have seen much referring to this here in this forum. I am having trouble with parameters 1-44, 1-45, and 146. I don't seem to be able to figure out how to enter the gearing ratio correctly. I suspect this is due to the fact that the parameters for gearing are able to be input as a large number, I cannot figure out where the real decimal point is in the setting, I fear that if I don't know which decimal is the right one, I have been entering erroneous numbers. I tried 0-ing out the value and they typing in a new one, but I just cant figure out where the number goes in relation to the (many) decimal places that the ASDA-B2 has in these parameters.
I gather that I should have 160,0000 pulses for my 1 full encoder rotation. I also gather that I should set 1-46 to 40,000 as this represents the "line count" I need for electronic gearing to work correctly. I am hazy on these matters.
It may all come down to needing better signal/conditioning of the pulses out of mach3, and having the pulses output in -5v/+5v differential via a Differential Line Driver. '
I plan to install the 750w servo on my 10ee as the Z axis. Mostly just to play with an AC servo/drive for a change. Very interesting stuff.
Notes:
A. the Delta manual is specific to later drives for my drive. I originally was using an incorrect version. the correct version uses a DB44 female connector for CNC1, and the old drive version used a different connector. Once I found the right manual, things made more sense.
B. you cannot alter some parameters unless you deactivate the drive by forcing "servo on" to "servo off" via perameter 2-30. Once disabled, all parameters can be adjusted. Note also that to have drive operate either in JOG or by Mach3, one HAS to activate parameter 2-30 by changing the value to 1 (on)
C. the manual is crazy long. 300 some pages. takes forever to scroll up and down to find information in section to section. very irritating, I would print it, but at 300+ pages, it will have to wait.
The Delta drive has many ways to interface inputs, open collector, single ended input/line driver, etc. I really could use a breakdown of how each works. I am not clear on if their is a way to cheat and run it without a differential signal? I did check to make sure I have a full +5vdc to the drive, but this is only half of a differential signal. I see that some people may have had success applying a single ended stream of pulses to the drive, but as of yet, I have not been able to make it work.
Their is discussion of using resistors and transistors to make the signal usable for the ADSA-B2, but I am really quite lost on this matter. Any insight would be welcome.
IF, anyone has a setup running mach3/ESS/C25BOB and a ASDA-B2 drive, I would be most interested in knowing what your settings in mach3 motor tuning/ports and pins/and ESS settings are. If I had these it could be a sort of baseline to start from.
ASDA-B2 manual is available here-
https://www.scribd.com/document/366289266/DELTA-IA-ASD-B2-UM-EN-20141217Thanks to everyone to taking the time to read this.
Nate in Ann Arbor Michigan.