I recently lucked into a steal of a deal and now I need to figure out how to best take advantage of it.

A surplus house on eBay had an Aerotech Unidex-12 4-axis controller up for bid and a Buy-It-Now of $2500.00. Amazingly, there was no reserve on the auction and I made a ridiculously low bid and won the unit.

It is basically an older model of the U511 controller
( http://www.aerotech.com/products/controllers/u511.html )
and is equipped with all 4 axes.

One axis is a stepper controller, 40V, 5A, 2000 steps per revolution (200 x 10 Microsteps).

The other three are for DC Brush Servos, again, 40V, 5A and instead of steps; wired for 2000 line encoders.

My quandry now is not only to figure out how to run this unit (it's a 230vac unit) and program it, but I need to know what to look for in DC Servo Motors.
Any suggestions?

I do have 3 brand new 400W Sanyo Denki AC Servo Motors I might be willing to trade for suitable DC Servos, or if somebody has Aerotech AC Servo Driver boards for the U11/U12 systems, I could use them as well.

Any suggestions on the use of this sort of controller, what to look for in DC Servos (i.e. good brands, how the power ratings compare to steppers, info on encoders...is 2000 line per revolution standard?..) or anybody with U111/U12 programming experience, I'd sure like to hear from you.

Regards,

Tom