[johnny t]

Well my first post and my first CNC, hope you guys can help. Found this craiglist special of a mill. lil surface rust. cleaning up well. the ball screws and linear slides seem to be in good shape also. Only thing, No control/driver box. the stepper motors are there and cabling looking for a home.

opened up some housings and see that this thing is muscled around with Superior Electric slo-syns. the spindle motor is a DC job I think.

My question(s) is, will drivers from say gecko or other makes than Superior work with these slo-syn motors?

the spindle motor wont go. were the motor electronics housed in the original control box? how can I find specs on this motor so I can source a power supply/vfd for this thing.

The videos I have seen of these lightmachines run seem pretty smooth, I would love to get this thing going and make my currently $300 investment go somewhere.

thanks again for any help.

[eartaker]

Help us out with some pics of the motors. Normally the geckos will work with all steppers but you need to know if the are bipolar or unipolar.

[johnny t]

I have a pic of the name plate on my phone, the model of one of them is M063-c506. 2.9 amp, 200 steps,

not sure yet if uni or bi. Is there a way to test with a voltmeter? my interpretation of the literature I have found on these units is that they can be wired for either?

I am a newbie at this so please use the cushioned chair.(chair)

[Fastest1]

Yes all of the steppers can be run on a gecko. It is actually a blessing all of the electronics are gone. You wont spend any of your time trying to resurrect a non supported machine and its software. Do you like to stay up late? Read alot? Get frustrated on a daily basis? You are going to love the new challenges! You will have to wire them so they dont exceed the 3.0 amp per axis of the G540 or go to a different higher voltage driver (do not do it, the 540 will be great for this machine). Is you rs a Sherline based machine that has been repackaged or is it the bigger model. If it is a Sherline it is an old AC motor, rheostat built into the controller box you dont have. Doesnt it have a 120v plug on the end? Mine did.

[johnny t]

a pic of my machine. pardon the size....



It is a tmc-1000 so that is bigger than the sherline mills me thinks. I was thinking the same thing regarding the electronics, and bought it solely for the chassis, spindle, ways/ball screws. I knew I had to figure out this CNC stuff eventually, hopefully this becomes a reasonable project. I stay up late and make my brain hurt all the time, but then I am just an amateur engineer.

there are two 120v plugs. I am assuming one for the controller and one for the spindle. They both terminate in the mills chassis.

[johnny t]

A gallery of what I have...

http://nohji.imgur.com/tmc1000_mill

[johnny t]

just looked up that G540 drive. one unit to run four steppers? I am intrigued.

[eartaker]

Nice little machine you have there. Yes the G540 is a breakout board with 4 motor controllers in a single unit. The G540 is actually made up of 4 G250 motor drives so if you burn one up you just replace that drive and not the whole unit.

[johnny t]

was worried a little about that. So the g540 is user serviceable too? guess the next question is what power supply/voltage to run?

[eartaker]

Yes the user can service it and Gecko has an AWESOME customer service.

for a power supply eh gecko can handle 50VDC so you will have no issues powering your motors. and from some searching I did it looks like your motors only take 3.36VDC @ 2.9A. I have never seen a stepper rated that low. If those are correct you could power your motors with an old computer power supply.

[hoss2006]

You can find the specs for those slo-syn motors here.
MC SUPPLY CO: Bodine Electric Co, KB Electronics, Brake Motor, Stepper, Gearmotor, Gearboxes, Clutch/Brake
The model in your pic M063-CS06, have an inductance of 2.85.
Put that in the Gecko formula, square root of the inductance times 32,
and you get a recommended power supply voltage of 54V.
That's the max you want to run them at, anymore and it's just wasted heat.
The 50V for the G540 would work great with them.
Unfortunately I just noticed that it's a 6 wire unipolar motor.
It can be wired up bipolar for the G540, but only in series.
That changes the inductance to 11.4 and for a power supply of 108V.
Good news is it'll give you 190 oz/in holding torque for the motor but at 50V it won't be a speed demon.
Still perfectly usable for that machine I'm sure.
Hoss

[Fastest1]

That is the larger of the 2 machines I have seen from light machines. Mine was a Spectralight by Light machines or something similar. I dont know about that spindle motor, it is not the 1 I was referring to. The 190oz steppers should be fine. You dont have the controller box? Are there any markings on the spindle motor? That is going to be a fine machine when hooked up. The G540 is a great package all the way around.

[Edgdais]

I got my 1000 up and runing a last month and it cutts good ! i gutted the thing out and put in 385oz steepers and BOB ,The spindel will not run unless you have the light machings control bored so I got a new scr for it .
I run mach3
Did you get the black control box? Program ?
$300.00 is a vary good price I will drive from MN it get it if you want to sell?

[kanton]

Here is a writeup of a TMC1000 running Mach3 on T30 ThinkPad: TMC1000 running Mach3 on T30 ThinkPad .

[rowbare]

Jermie, all steppers have these low voltage ratings. If you don't know the inductance of the motor, you usually run them at 20-24x the voltage rating. Calculating the voltage from the inductance gives you a better match though.

bob

[rgbonk]

I have a ProLight 1000 and love it. Intelitek has been a real help to me on the occasions I have had to trouble shoot issues.

[nobikes]

Hello,

I recently picked up the sane light machine with M063-CS06 steppers. I have the original controller but i can not get the machine to move. I like the idea of switching over to the Gecko 540 drives. My first question is does any one have a pin out for the steper motor? My stepper has a socket with a 7 pin connector. 2nd has anyone managed to get the original controller to work with mach 3?

[dan_the_welder]

I hooked mine up using a buffered breakout board to connect to the black control box. The safety switch for the safety shield prevented the spindle from starting until I taped the magnet for it to the switch.

I got it to work with LinuxCNC, and should be as easily doable with Mach. I believe this will work with the Prolight Machining Center or Prolight 2000 and the TMC 1000 . For what it's worth probably the Prolight turning center.


This thread has some good info. pinouts etc. http://www.cnczone.com/forums/vertic...m-posts-3.html one of my motor cables had the connector smashed.

This page has the info you need to hook the box up to your PC running either EMC LinuxCNC or Mach3 build.spaceopera.org | Hacking SpectraLight Mills and Lathes

So get a buffered breakout board, connect things like this chart from the spaceopera page suggests:

NOTE your breakout board will have preferred pinouts for the axis steps and directions and probably spindle on and off, you will be connecting those points on your breakout board to the pins defined in the 'controller box column' of this chart.

************************************************** ************************************************** ******************

Parallel port (Male)	Controller box cable (Female)	Notes
1	22	Enables the spindle
2	6	X Dir
3	21	X Step
4	18	Y Dir
5	20	Y Step
6	5	Z Dir
7	19	Z Step
8	4	Spindle on/off
13	23	ESTOP Warning: May or may not work, if connecting this causes EMC to stop (thinking the button has been pressed at random times), disable it in the stepconf. Placing a 10uf (and possibly much smaller) capacitor in parallel with this signal and grounding it acts as a filter. Problems with this line were resolved using this technique.
14	17	Mill Amp on/off
25	7	GND
--	--	--
----------------------------------	--------------------------------------------	--------------------------------------------------------------------

************************************************** *************************

I connected 22 (spindle enable) and 17 (amp enable - this means stepper driver enable )
to a single pin that I drove high from my settings.

Connect step and direction for each axis, as your buffered or opto-isolated board suggests and then
make your LinuxCNC or Mach config match.

Don't forget the ground, pin 7!

Check your Active high or lows, or "invert" tick box. If your breakout board uses schmidt triggers vs. optos.
it may flip the signal so try both ways if the motors engage but don't move as commanded. Also it's
going through the control box which may flip it again so there's that to consider.

Don't forget the safety shield magnetic switch, it disables the spindle.

Download the Minarik manual for the speed control. If your Breakout board will do a 0-10v signal then you can hook up the two wires in that last DB-9 connector coming off the mill to those pins and control your speed from the PC too. I have not tried this, but the manual implies that it will even work with a 0-5v signal with a little bit of screwdriver twiddling.

The fuses in the holders may be dirty, that will cause weirdness, Mine was DOA... until I jiggled the fuse.

Have fun,

[Contract_Pilot]

Link to buffered breakout board?