emc-users, I acquired a Clausing 1450 NC lathe with the intention of LinuxCNC retrofit about 6 years ago. I had all kinds of plans to make my own servo drives but never really made much progress due to other priorities. Now I am getting impatient and want to move forward. Currently this machine has no controls. The machine is fitted with x and z servo motors without tachometers and with no provisions for tachs. The original control was NC by paper tape. I have none of the original controls and I am apparently the 3rd owner intending to retrofit this machine. The basic machine is early 70's vintage and looks like an engine lathe. It is in remarkably good shape probably because it is not a production style machine and it was probably a real pain to program and run. The ball screws show no lost motion with a 0.0001" reading indicator. The ways look good and are flame hardened. The serial number is 155003 stamped on the bed.
My plan: I have an Asus M5A 78L-M LX MB with debian 10 and preempt-rt kernel. I have LinuxCNC 2.8 installed. I also have installed an intel dual port server NIC that is supported by the OS. Max latency is 50,000 nsec average is about 25,000 nsec. with the combination above. I am thinking that I want to use Mesa Etherent I/O cards and I want to use PID servo control. About the motors: These are Peerless DC motors (8 brushes). 66V max and 3.75 Amps Max. 800 RPM coupled directly to the ball screws with a servo coupling. I will need to fit decent encoders to the ball screws. I have some SICK hiperface SIN/COS encoders with 1024 cycles per rev. Even if I just use these as incremental encoders without SIN/COS interpolations I can get 4096 counts / rev and my ball screws are 0.2" / Rev so that would yield 0.000048828" of linear travel per count. Max speed will be 160 in/min @ 800 RPM. I am wondering what might be the easiest way to drive these motors and get reasonable performance without spending too much money. This is not my first LinuxCNC retrofit. I had a lot of online help back in about 2008 to retrofit a BP series II Interact. That machine is still running LinuxCNC 2.3 and works fine for me. http://www.machineability.com/Bridgeport_series_II.html Thanks to guys like John Kasunich, Crhis Radek, Jeff Epler, Stephen Wille Padnos and others typically one line in those days. But what really got my started was attending an EMC-Fest in 2008 in Galesburg IL. Suggestions on Mesa + some kind of Servo Drive are welcome. I can build stuff, I just don't want the project to be too big:-) Regards John Figie _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
