Alrighty....after several weeks of doing, undoing, redoing, ordering and reordering parts the electronics, I now have a fully functional machine! Sheesh I though this build would go smoother.
My plans to use most of the original components from the controller slowly went out the door. I have now replaced the power supply, breakout board, Geckodrives and removed the PC from the control box and installed it is a separate computer case. The control box now holds just the PS, BOB and Gecko's.
During the reconfiguration process I had dropped some copper wire trimmings in the case and some got into the mother board causing a fault. At that point I decided it would best to separate the PC from everything else. Fortunately the PC still works fine. With that out of the control box I reconfigured the layout to make things easier to service. It was kind of a nightmare with everything in one box.
The new Gecko G201X's are really sweet drives. Easy to configure, small form factor and tune the motors nicely plus they keep the motors nice and cool.
I had swapped out the original 34vd power supply for a 77vdc unit but after blowing the rectifier diodes on a Chinese drive I had on the Z-axis I replaced that with a 67vdc unit to give the Gecko's a little more headroom. I can't tell the difference in power from the 67vdc to the 77vdc units.
I have put the keyboard / monitor drawer on hold. I found a keyboard / monitor stand at a local computer surplus store for cheap so I am using that. Kind of a hack mounting job but it will do for a while. I may ditching the separate PC, keyboard and monitor and use a laptop on the stand with a better mounting job.
The spindle is a 1.5Kw 110vac water cooled unit from Automation Technologies along with a mating 1.5Kw 110vac VFD. I had not found much information on the 110vac spindles so I took a chance on it. I have not cut anything yet but so far it seems to run well. The VFD took a while to figure out the programming.
The typical Huanyang manual's can be tricky to follow plus they are for the 220/380 vac units, nothing in them about 110vac units. Fortunately I had gone through programming a Huanyang on my mill so I knew most of the parameters that needed to be entered. The only hiccup I had was the unit came with a built-in speed pot. That was interfering with the inputs from the spindle speed control board. Took me a while to find in the manual how to disable it.
Spindle cooling is a PC cooling radiator, 120mm fan and a small PC coolant pump. I'm hoping the single fan & radiator will be sufficient. I'm going to keep a close eye on temps for a while.
Just got done setting up the home/Limit switches and calibrating all the axis so it should be good to go.
Tomorrow I will pickup some MDF for the table top and see about running a test engraving program.
Jay
