This is my first post and first topic in this forum (the first forum I've joined other than my native language). Thanks to you, I learned a lot about linuxcnc and different topics. Finally, I registered to gather my thoughts and open a topic. Since I used translation while writing the article, there may be some problems. Please excuse me
I have been doing research on making a CNC machine for a long time. I have met many alternatives on the software side. Driving stepper motors with simple grbl software, slightly more advanced NC solvers such as fluidnc, ready-made control units, windows-based mach and finally linuxcnc.
Mechanically speaking, I have the following design in mind:
A router with a fixed bridge and a processing area of 60x40cm. This machine should be able to cut aluminum very easily. I am thinking of using epoxy granite casting and aluminum sheets for the body material.
Where I work now, there is a large machining center, lathe, 4kw fiber laser and twisting machine. These are all CNC and I know how to use them. I have the opportunity to use all of them for the weekends. Using these opportunities, I want to make permanent magnet ac servo motors myself, in addition to the body parts. Even though the power density in terms of volume is not as much as industrial servos, I think it can be a good start. I will laser cut the thin transformer sheets and bring them together to form the stator. Then I will do the copper winding. I will machine the rotor and body with CNC lathe and milling machine and place the magnets. There are many mechanical details.
I want to use odrive as Servo Motor driver. I will design the voltage and current of the motor I will build in accordance with this driver.
The Odrive project is a closed loop servo controller in itself. Although servo examples are generally made with low-power drone motors, it has a power potential much higher than what I need, such as 56v-70a 4kw. It is used in many applications for location applications. I can't see any physical impediment to it not being used on a medium sized CNC project.
Now it's time for the questions that come to my mind.
Odrive manages the motor and encoder connections itself. Since the pid cycle ends within the odirve itself, would it be enough to just give it pulse and direction commands? In this scenario, linuxcnc will know the current location from the signals it sends. If there is no error signal from the driver, where it thinks it is will be correct. I don't think I need the "mesa" card for this setup.
Can I use Raspberry Pi's own IO outputs without a MESA card? Or is it possible to use a current PC without a parallel output as a Linuxcnc PC and send commands to a Raspberry Pi via ethernet? Raspberry Pi will drive the io pins with commands from Ethernet. Just like a mesa with an ethernet interface. Is this possible? If we can send packets to an IP address from "linuxcnc" using the ethernet port, there is no reason not to make our own ethernet "mesa" card. For this purpose, cheap alternatives can be used instead of expensive raspberry.
www.crocuspi.com/zero_en.html
The software running on these cards connected to the Ethernet network will only convert incoming data packets into orders to be sent to the io pins. The Linux card with 64MB RAM in the link can do this job very quickly.
If it is possible to communicate with the TCP protocol over Ethernet, I would like to get one of these cheap cards and start working on this subject.