Retrofit process for Biesse 321R

POD and rail machines you have to create your own procedural logic on how you want to operate the machine.
point to point they call it, which is difficult to replicate but not really needed when using a good cam.

Thanks, Bob!

I had read most of your posts before I decided to buy the machine. In the back of my mind, I have been thinking that this road has been traveled before and that voices of reason will guide me back onto it when I take inevitable wrong turns.

The machine is now in my garage and I am in the process of setting it up for power on. I will post pictures in another thread. I agree that the Biesse schematics are very well labeled. I spent a couple of hours doing the overview of them this morning. I have the full stack of manuals along with Biesse software with the parallel port hardware key, and customer training manuals. I am in overwhelm mode now.

Tommy's post had convinced me to do the power-on last week, I appreciate the second opinion in that direction. There appears to be quite a safety loop on this thing and clearing all the hurdles makes sense. My Tool changer is different and I want to understand how that was implemented so that the process of making it work in LCNC goes smoothly.

It appears that the rails are tied into the serial outputs of the XNC compact, in your 321R retrofit, are the displays connected?

Do you think there is any benefit to documenting the XNC serial bus protocol?

faeluke wrote: Thanks, Bob!

I had read most of your posts before I decided to buy the machine. In the back of my mind, I have been thinking that this road has been traveled before and that voices of reason will guide me back onto it when I take inevitable wrong turns.

The machine is now in my garage and I am in the process of setting it up for power on. I will post pictures in another thread. I agree that the Biesse schematics are very well labeled. I spent a couple of hours doing the overview of them this morning. I have the full stack of manuals along with Biesse software with the parallel port hardware key, and customer training manuals. I am in overwhelm mode now.

Tommy's post had convinced me to do the power-on last week, I appreciate the second opinion in that direction. There appears to be quite a safety loop on this thing and clearing all the hurdles makes sense. My Tool changer is different and I want to understand how that was implemented so that the process of making it work in LCNC goes smoothly.

It appears that the rails are tied into the serial outputs of the XNC compact, in your 321R retrofit, are the displays connected?

Do you think there is any benefit to documenting the XNC serial bus protocol?

Many have been down that road of trying to reverse engineer. No one to my knowledge has achieved this and most fall back on scrapping the rs485 modules. proprietary protocol really fast and just not worth the time and effort. Especially if you don't do this daily would take forever to figure out.

The key to these machines is the front end logic with the green light and push button. Powerup and try to get a green light. You will see all the mag switches and such the estop loop and emerg ropes etc all chain on this loop that needs to be clear before you can do anything else on this machine.

I am doing a rover 20 now and just got the pre loop figured out. just some thoughts.

After that it is just getting the spindle/vfd worked out, usually pot emu interface works well and enabling the drives and getting the control to the drives. After that input/outputs and then remapping for tool change.

That's about it... lol

Not sure what you are talking about with real time analyzers with the p[od machines.

I use 7i70 and 7i71 along with 7i74 and put the 7i70,7i71 in the machine and not in the control panel.
I have done Biesse 346 with over 120 inputs and 98 outputs. I had boards all over the machine. The 7I74 is nice so you can put up to 8 i/o cards so you would have plenty of I/O. The scanning of the inputs is not a problem for the CNC machines because it is not really time eccentric in a since. So no problem with those cards using for I/O for your Biesse machine.

Many have been down that road of trying to reverse engineer. No one to my knowledge has achieved this and most fall back on scrapping the rs485 modules. proprietary protocol really fast and just not worth the time and effort. Especially if you don't do this daily would take forever to figure out.

I spend a fair amount of time debugging PMBUS and Intel SVID transactions. Both of these protocols have rigid structures that are well documented and I have the documents. I understand that this is different. I have the tools and the training, but maybe not the time. I will throw my high-speed scope on the signals while I am trying to figure the rest of it out. If anything shakes out of it, you will see it here.

Thanks!

Hi,
I'm tempted to buy rover 321r for sale nearby. Horizontal drilling capability and tool changer would be useful but usually those machine are out of my price range. Do you have any advice or resources that could help to choose if I should embark in retrofitting.
Thanks!
juho@caramail.com