On 1 March 2010 03:30, Gene Heskett <gene.hesk...@gmail.com> wrote: > Subroutines that can increment the variable by .00025" a pass are well within > emc's capabilities.
It seems to me that cylindrical grinding can be practically identical to running a lathe, though that might not be the easiest or most appropriate way to do it. Running it at as a lathe you would probably convert the hydraulic feeds to ballscrews and run a simple lathe-type G-code subroutine to perform a grinding cycle. Wheel-size changes can be easily handled in the tool table. For semi-automatic lathe operations I have a set of G-code routines that take feed and dimension data from a pyvcp panel, then simply loop through until the desired dimensions are reached. I can put them somewhere accessible if that would be helpful. With this approach the machine would run the same G-code routine pretty much full-time with the input data changing job-to-job rather than the G-code file itself. I think you would need a user-panel anyway for wheel on/off and speed control linked to a second PWM generator and VFD. (Though you could probably re-purpose a coolant or lubricant control) An alternative to ballscrew conversion would be to retain the existing hydraulic drives (possibly only Z-longitudinal, with a ballscrew X-axis) and then have a G-code routine that infeeds when it sees a change in state of the endstops. The endstops could be retained as mechanical with additional microswitches to inform EMC, or the valving could be converted to electro-hydraulic with switches that open and close hydraulic valves and also inform EMC that the endstop has been reached. A more advanced alternative would be to fit linear encoders (again possibly only to the Z-axis) and have EMC handle "soft endstops". This could be handled by a few lines in HAL that compare the encoder positions to pyvcp number-boxes, triggering valve openings/closings directly and reporting back to the G-code via digital inputs. This would mean that you could alter the endstop positions with the machine running (good for grinding to shoulders, though potentially rather dangerous) -- atp ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
