Hello. It's been a while. It turns out that eBay people are not fast... unsurprising I know.

Anyway, I now have my motor, controller, and cables.

The motor: Kollmorgen: AKM32H-ANCN2-00

Ordering the motor went smoothly, but it was also the slowest to get here. It's in pretty good shape. There is a little rust on it, apparently from the mounting screws that were used, but I should be able to take care of that with no problem. There are a few cosmetic scratches also.



The controller: Advanced Motion Controls: B30A40AC

This controller is over-powered for my motor, but better that then the other way around. I was having a hard time finding a controller I liked that would do 120V and 240V all at 1 phase, but this one has everything I want. It's in pristine condition. They must have slapped it in a machine and not touched it until it was removed and sent to me.


Cables:

Getting the cables done was a *****. I'm an electrical engineer and I have made a good number of cables over the years, but this was a struggle. First, neither Mouser or Digikey had the exact mating connectors, but the Mouser search yielded a cross reference. I ordered the connectors and looked specifically to see if they included the sockets. It didn't say anywhere but other pages specifically stated when they did not include the sockets so I assumed they were included. They were not. The second order to Mouser was for the pins. They were the wrong ones. The datasheet for the connectors is trash and it says it has 1mm and 3.6mm sockets for the power connector when what it really has is 1mm and 2mm sockets. I guess I should have measured the pins myself but here I am after the third order to Mouser. At least I'm keeping UPS in business... It looks like the off-the-shelf cables from Kollmorgen are $170 (!) so I still beat that by a wide margin. Ha. Anyway they're made and looking good. I only took pictures of one, but they both look similar.


Once I got the cables built, I hooked it all up. It was a pain to get all the controller settings correct and I had to get some clarification from one of the techs at work in the motion group. He was super helpful and now its spinning up fine. I'll take a video of it at some point.

Here is everything laid out together and a paperback for size comparison. That controller is big; about the size of a phone book cut in half.




I started designing the adapter plate to mount the motor on the mill and ran into an issue. At 120V, this motor will go 3K rpm so if I want to go 6k rpm, I need to gear it up. Finding a timing pulley combination to do this has been tough. The mill shaft is 35mm and the motor shaft is 14mm which is a large disparity. The best combination I have found so far will give me 5k rpm, but the pulleys are huge. I'm not happy with it yet. I'm going to think about going strait to 240V which will give me a higher motor speed and I can use smaller pulleys. Wiring the garage for 240V is non-trivial of course.

You can see how large the pulleys would be in this model. The pink is the top of the mill's head.


There are some other things to do in the mean time. I need to experiment with getting the analog voltage out of the G540. I also need to tune the motor speed and feedback loops. It's pretty easy to do that stuff with my electronic equipment at work. I'm not sure how someone would do it properly if they didn't have a precision power supply, DMM, and oscilloscope. I guess you could find a way to get close.

That's whats happening for now. Hopefully updates will be more frequent again since I'm not waiting on shipments.

TK