Searching for a consultant. Willing to pay.

Do you really think it's necessary to replace the servos?  I'm not opposed to that but the motors work great.  I thought there must be options to just replace the amps.

Personally I'm just used to working with servos and drives as a set. You tend to get off into the weeds trying to make sure the encoder is compatible and making cables. There's certainly options to re-use the servos (not sure what your machine has). It's just a matter of hassle to reuse them vs cost of new motors which can certainly vary. A 400w DMM servo is probably like $150, and if it goes bad it's easy to get a replacement. Not shilling for DMM I just use them relatively frequently. My last bill from DMM was $1464 for 3 0.75-1kw drives and 3 750w 5k rpm servos for reference. I typically make my own cables.

BTW, thanks for all your work on Path. Freecad and Path is all I really use. I'm not a major machinist or anything but it works for me.

Damn, those prices are good!
I payed more for just 3 servo drives a few years back.

tommylight wrote:

Damn, those prices are good!
I payed more for just 3 servo drives a few years back.
 

Well Cables would have bumped that up about $500. I make motor cables out of VFD cable from McMaster Carr, Chainflex or something (it's good stuff) and encoder cable from some 4-wire shielded Belden cable. Somehow Firewire connectors became a standard for encoder-drive and they're easy to get ahold of very cheap. I just use plastic liquidproof connectors at the motor which is better than the Molex style connector that smaller Yaskawa servos use

I would like to hear more about the problem you had with DMM though, was it just with analog velocity control?

Do you have any wiring diagrams for the machine? How much help are you looking for? If you can post a list of questions with details maybe I can help. Or do you need help even getting a list of details and questions together?

As others have already mentioned purchasing matched servo kits, is selection of kits and how to interface them to Mesa and LCNC as far as you need help or will you need someone to have/generate all the wiring details as well?

blazini36 wrote:

I would like to hear more about the problem you had with DMM though, was it just with analog velocity control?

I never used DMM, i live in a good forsaken country so shipping from US will cost more than the drives.
There is a lengthy topic here with the issue, the analog signal gets delayed inside the drive to the point that it is useless with LinuxCNC. There are several members that just gave up on it and switched to step/dir control, means switching from 7i77 to 7i76, or the likes.
Here is when i was still good with them
forum.linuxcnc.org/27-driver-boards/4122...ead-of-analog#196272
and issues
forum.linuxcnc.org/27-driver-boards/4122...ad-of-analog?start=0
forum.linuxcnc.org/30-cnc-machines/37782...-22-retrofit?start=0

tommylight wrote:

blazini36 wrote:

I would like to hear more about the problem you had with DMM though, was it just with analog velocity control?
I never used DMM, i live in a good forsaken country so shipping from US will cost more than the drives.
There is a lengthy topic here with the issue, the analog signal gets delayed inside the drive to the point that it is useless with LinuxCNC. There are several members that just gave up on it and switched to step/dir control, means switching from 7i77 to 7i76, or the likes.
Here is when i was still good with them
forum.linuxcnc.org/27-driver-boards/4122...ead-of-analog#196272
and issues
forum.linuxcnc.org/27-driver-boards/4122...ad-of-analog?start=0
forum.linuxcnc.org/30-cnc-machines/37782...-22-retrofit?start=0
 

Don't wanna hijack the thread but I misunderstood what you said before. I gather you were trying to get them to send some evaluation units out to people in return for some kind of feedback so they could improve this analog issue?

Not quite sure why anyone would choose to use analog if replacing both the controller to use LCNC and adding new servo drives themselsves but to each their own. I took a quick peak at the manual to refresh my memory and it is confusing that they consider analog as velocity control and S+D is only listed as position control. That could be the case in some way but like I said I use a 5krpm servo with S+D and since I do mostly aluminum I run the thing @ 5k pretty much non stop. I do rigid tapping with it too

Don't mind the yapping, was trying to prove the point that you didn't need a 1:1 belt spindle drive or an spindle mounted encoder to do rigid tapping with LinuxCNC