Hi all, I have a mill which runs a mesa 5i20 card and I am now starting a lathe build/retrofit (more on that later!). Compared to a few years ago there are now three or four variants of these cards available: 5i20, 5i22-1, 5i22-1.5 and 5i23. Also, I know there has been some good work on the modular hm2 fpga-code and emc2-driver for these cards.
- How stable is the hm2 fpga-code + driver right now? anyone using it routinely for 'production' ? - Any benefits of the 5i23 (400kgate fpga) over the 5i20 (200k fpga) ? - The 5i22 cards are more expensive, have a bit more I/O, but isn't the large fpga overkill for a setup where emc2 runs the pid-loops on the cpu anyway? For the lathe I will have servos on the Z- and X-axes, not sure about DC-brush vs. brushless yet, but Jon Elsons PWM amps work very well on the mill so I am leaning towards them. Then the spindle will hopefully be driven by a big 1.75kW brushless servo. The lathe project also calls for a revolver-type toolchanger which needs one I/O bit for a pneumatic cylinder, and one servo/stepper axis to rotate the revolver. In addition I will need the usual jog-pendant I/O: MPG (thinking about two, separate for X and Z), a few selection-switches, and some buttons. Live tooling is a dream for the future :) Looking at the schematic for the mill[1], I think the lathe setup will be pretty similar and I should be OK with 72 I/O pins. regards, Anders W [1] http://www.anderswallin.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/dc_servo_schematic_2008jan19.pdf ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
