control interface for yaskawa's

hi all. I have 6 beuatiful matched sets of yaskawa motors and servopacks from pick and place robots. there sgm motors and sgda-xxxs servopacks. Is there anything out there to cnc control these besides 1000 dollar galil. can pixies still be gotten? I read this and other posts relentlessly to no avail. Thers got to something out there! I e-mailed mesa products no reply, check granites, checked a lot of places, lots of vague info on ac servo control. can I get a older galil isa card to do the trick in a older computer. any schematic to build my own. any help or leads would be greatly appreciated. thanks joe

Welcome to the world of fog and mist!

I guess you are wanting to run these with some type of PC based CNC software? If so, Mach3 and the Galil is and option. But as you said, the Galil cards are a bit pricey for the hobbyist. But I can verify the Mach3/Galil/Yaskawa combo works great. I have SGDA-02BS drives and SGM-02B314 motors. I did a lot of work on the Mach3/Galil plugin and I can tell you that If you can swing a Galil, you wont go wrong. Any of the 2000, 1800, 1700 series controllers work fine. Just be sure to get an extra axis on it to control a spindle if you need to.

I'm also working on a Mach plugin for the Mesa 5i20 and 7i43 boards. The plugin is finished, but I'm working on building up a machine to test/prove it out. It's a mini-mill that will be fitted with the above mentioned Yaskawa parts. It will be a few weeks yet.

But... the SGDA-XXXP drives do position control and will work with the Mach parallel port and a breakout board. No need for +-10v analog signal. You can pickup those types of Yaskawa drives pretty reasonably. Just size them to your motors.

Steve

The SGDA drives you can do position control, Mach will drive them you will just need a breakout board to do the hook up with

thanks friends for the advice. I have picked up 2 galil controllers for my "s' series yaskawas now i just need to figure out if i should go with a interconnect breakout module or just try to create my own cables. Smurph if you have any wiring diagrams or pics of connections on these i'd be eternally grateful. I am building some kind of 2000 lb freak machine from a old circuit board assembler. I am hoping to be able to mill metal and switch over and do reliefs on full size entrance doors. I've been trying to cheat and find "p" series drives for 500 and 750 watt motors but have had no luck without a big pricey tag. I really want to learn and understand ac servo systems and have studied the galil videos read like crazy but it is just eluding my conprehention. But you know these are the things that really keep our minds into this stuff. My 2'x4' stepper router works great acme and geckos but i cant wait to see 5 pitch ball screw with ac servos go whipping around. smurph thanks for all the work your doing and a big shout out to every last soul out here contributing.Love from a mad cnc enthusiast.

Joe,

Here is a nice little page that breaks the wiring down in a good manner.

http://www.mech.northwestern.edu/cou...ervomotors.htm

I hope you got the cables that connect to the CN1 and CN2 connectors on the drives. Otherwise, the part numbers are there on that page. It's just a pain to build them. But if you have to, you have to.

Servo systems are not all that complicated. There are just many variations. AC or DC, resolver/halls/encoder feedback, speed/torque, or position control, etc... The main thing is that you need the right motor for any given drive, or visa versa. You have that covered with you Yaskawa stuff. I really like the Yaskawa drives and motors.

Speed and torque control is usually in the form of a +-10v reference from the motion controller to the drive. Position control is step and direction pulses from the controller to the drive. The Galil will do both. For speed/torque, the PID loop is closed on the controller. For position control, the PID loop is closed on the drive itself.

With your speed/torque control drives ("S" suffix), you will need to setup the PID values in the Galil. If you have never done this before, then you will most likely want to get Galil's WSDK software (~$99.00). Or, if you have an oscilloscope, you can tune them manually. The WSDK stuff gets you in the ball park and can probably be a time/frustration saver. In other words, it's a good bang for the buck.

To setup the SGDAs, you will need Yaskawas SVMON software and a custom serial cable (pinouts in the manuals) or a digital operator (JUS-OP03A).

The next thing you will need is a a breakout for the Galil. Yes, you can make one, but what a pain in the rear! Plus, the Galil ICMs have some nice features. The 100 pin cable is the main thing that will give you trouble. It's probably best to just bite the bullet and buy one from Galil. There was, at one time, a guy selling some made up interconnects on eBay, but I have not seen them in a while.

The CN1 connections will go to the Galil ICM. The motor encoders are brought out from the the CN2 connector to the CN1 connector. A pass though of sorts. So you don't have to hack your encoder cables. Really, all that needs to be hooked up from the CN1 to the Galil ICM is the reference signal (either speed or torque. I use speed), the encoder signals, and the amp enable signal. The limit signals are hooked to the Galil instead of the SGDAs.

Steve

To get familiar with the Galil controller on a one to one level, I would recommend playing around with commands and tuning using the free Galil Terminal program, this way you can use the Galil two letter native commands to operate the motion card and experiment with manual tuning, this also help to overcome puzzling problems you may have when hooking it up to the HMI etc.
Al.