Fujitsu Siemens E5600 - any known issues?

Tidy! I have Roy's PCPPS BOB, so at least I can buy his spindle board in the confidence that there won't be any compatibility issues.

I use his BOBs too, they are a good price, Zap Automation was re-selling them at one point for £15 more.

He has a couple of different boards. Which one do you recommend? I have 3 spare outputs on my BOB (pins 14, 16 and 17)

Depends exactly what you need.

I only use the equivilent of his SP4S, ie the single relay. That is because my power feed to the spindle contactor goes through a relay on the BOB.
So single relay will take 2 outputs for step/dir and output 0-10v plus relay for M3/M4

A double relay will take 3 outputs and additionaly give you a 'Run' relay to power the contactor or whatever enables the spindle.

Which ever one suits, the only warning is never connect or disconnect whilst there is any power in the system and preferably ground any leads before connecting to be doubly sure.
In common with opto isolated stepper drivers, they are very sensitive to that kind of thing.

regards

I'll have to have a think about how I'm going to rig up the VFD. I'm still undecided whether to mount it on the Warco WM16 head (close to the AC motor - where the original start/stop box used to be) or fit it into my cabinet and run the UVW/E cables to the motor in some metal cored Adaptaflex/Flexicon. I'm more inclined to go for the latter but am unsure how the VFD might affect the stepper drives?

For the control side, the main supply to the VFD will be through a safety controlled contactor so that power is killed in the event of an E-stop. The idea is to keep the VFD powered up whenever the system is healthy because they don't like having their power supplies cycled regularly. After that, I should only need a direction signal, a run signal and the 0-10v analogue input. Does that sound OK? This is my first CNC, so I still have a lot of 'what ifs'.

ArcEye wrote:

I only use the equivilent of his SP4S

Equivalent? Is there an alternative (chinese?) source?

birchy wrote:

I'll have to have a think about how I'm going to rig up the VFD. I'm still undecided whether to mount it on the Warco WM16 head (close to the AC motor - where the original start/stop box used to be) or fit it into my cabinet and run the UVW/E cables to the motor in some metal cored Adaptaflex/Flexicon. I'm more inclined to go for the latter but am unsure how the VFD might affect the stepper drives?

Thats the normal way, use four core screened cable grounded at ONE end.

It is unlikely to affect the steppers, but route it away from limit and home switch wiring.

For the control side, the main supply to the VFD will be through a safety controlled contactor so that power is killed in the event of an E-stop. The idea is to keep the VFD powered up whenever the system is healthy because they don't like having their power supplies cycled regularly. After that, I should only need a direction signal, a run signal and the 0-10v analogue input. Does that sound OK? This is my first CNC, so I still have a lot of 'what ifs'.

Sounds reasonable

ArcEye wrote:

I only use the equivilent of his SP4S

Equivalent? Is there an alternative (chinese?) source?

No I meant I have versions 1 or 2 of the same boards, with the single relay. The double relay was not available when I bought them

regards