Retrofitting Morbidelli Author 400

Hi,

I have a Morbidelli Author 400 machine which has got a NUM 1020 control today that I wish to convert. I have issues with the control PC has not failed and I have wanted to change the control system for something modern anyway for quite some time. I have been using it to mill a lot of aluminium and have done some modifications to it. I could possibly use the NUM 1020 controller but I feel it would be too much of a headache compared to just going with linuxcnc.

The mill uses Yaskawa 1xSGDB-15VD and 2xSGDB-10VD servo drives thus I am leaning towards using Mesa 7I97 for this. I think they should directly interface without problems. Thoughts?

The Control cabinet has got all I/O going to relay or an I/O board so doing the conversion should be rather easy. See picture,
 

So my idea is to make an own PCB with all connectors that exist on the current NUM 1020 controller and have this board as a interface towards the mesa boards. I will put any drivers needed for relays etc on my own board. There are 48 relays that need to be driven and there are 64 inputs. However not a lot of inputs are used, so I could probably skip having that much inputs. I think I will chose an 7I80HD-25 for this control thus just using a ribbon cable over to my own PCB.

I will be using a 22" touch screen as on the CNC plasma table shown below and also probably have mechanical buttons plus an MPG.

What are you thoughts of all this? Should I do it in another way? I chose the mesa cards a bit depending on what is available right now, so I will try to buy them as quickly as possible. I need to look into a bit how I will control the VFD but I believe that should be easy.

 
VFD and servo drives

   
Control panel

 
The mill standing as when it quit working  

 
Bonus picture of the Plasma CNC also running linuxcnc

Is there any reason if I should change and use step/dir mode of the CNC servo drive instead of +/- 10V analog drive? I can see the drive does support both but right now as the original machine is using +/- 10V.

Should this topic be in the CNC Machines category instead of Milling? Saw now it fits better there.

Current plan is,
7i97
7i74
7i70
7i71 or 7i72, need to check if its source or sink today
Possibly 7i73 for control panel

I don't really want to replace the relay boards because the voltages those relays switch varies, some is switching mains voltages. Also for simplicity it is quite easy to just attach the cables today directly to the mesa driver board without much effort.

Or would it be better to use some other card combination that does work with pcconf directly making it easier to tune the axises etc? From what I understand the 7i97 is not supported directly by pcconf?

Thank you!

hi,
I have the same machine and I want to convert to linuxcnc. How was the upgrade for you? What stage are you at?
What cards did you end up using?

I have not gotten started on this. I did do a translation of the schematic from Italian to English and I have bought all the boards I believe I need.

I ended up buying,
MESA 7i74 Eight Channel RS-422/485 interface/ RJ45 Breakout
MESA 7i71 Isolated remote power driver card sourcing outputs
MESA 7I70 Isolated remote digital input card
MESA 7I87 Remote isolated Analog input card
MESA 7I97 Ethernet interfaced Analog servo plus I/O

Might be a bit overkill on the amount of I/O but I felt it was the easiest way to do it on this machine.

I intended to do a PCB which interfaces between all these MESA boards and the current connectors in the unit but I think I will skip that and just make a panel which holds all the PCBs and route all cables and add them to the boards cable by cable.

I will update this thread when I start working on it, which is hopefully soon because I need the machine.