I got a few R2010's used off ebay after initially expecting to use gecko drives on my mill, which I've set up a power supply for 75 VDC with a 1500VA Antek toroid, 4x 60A bridge rectifiers (2x per side of the transformer secondary in parallel), 2x 56000 uF capacitor bank for the motor drive side (hey they were cheap).
I then bought some R2210 interfaces, hooked to HEDS 5500 encoder on the Electro-Craft motor I'm trying to figure out tuning on first, well second I guess. I've built a tuning cable as described in the R2000setup document, had some problems with the parallel port on the PC I was using it with (BTW you should revise that document for that - turns out PS/2 or AT modes in the bios on my Dell don't like to work with SPI & your drives, but ECP mode worked fine.
First question is to answer some ambiguity - the R2000setup document says the R2010 needs to see .03 ohms/volt or a braking resistor needs to be installed. Since 2 of my motors are old and I can't get data sheets on them, I measured one and came up with 4.8 Ohms, subtracting 1 ohm for my DMM I get 3.8 ohms, if I calculated correctly the R2010 needs to see 75Vx .03 ohms = 2.2 ohms, if my servo's number (3.8) is more than that do I need to do anything or am I ok to run it as is? Also do you have any reference as to how to build a good shunt regulator as referenced in the R2000faq document?
First problem is that I have a drive/encoder/encoder interface that I attempted to hook up to another motor that I purchased to replace a missing one on the mill, this motor had a CUI 103 encoder fitted, regardless of swapping wires or checking swap boxes on the tuning software the motor slowly runs away, at low speeds the encoder seems accurately counting but if I spin the shaft faster (with motor disconnected) the tuning software is clearly missing a lot of encoder counts. I haven't put my scope on it but suspect a noise problem, does rutex have any recommendations or can/should I try what Gecko suggested for HEDS encoders here: Using HEDS Encoders - Servo Drives - Application Notes - Support ?
Next is tuning. The second motor I tried, an old electro craft with a HEDS 5500 seems to be working as it should but I'm not clear on what I'm aiming for as far as a tuning end result.
I read the R2000setup document beginning to end, and the tuning part several times. I wish your website would've stated that the R2xTuneVB6 program allows you to adjust settings at the same time you watch the tuning graph, I figured that out the hard way.
I started by increasing servo loop time to 2 ms, increase Kp til I get oscillation, play with Kd and Kd index till I get better damping so I'm not oscillating when steps are commanded. Now the R2000setup doc tells me to increase Ki till I get overshoot? How much overshoot should I be aiming for? I notice that I don't get the same amount of overshoot depending on direction the motor is rotating, is that a problem? How fast is the software generating pulses when it commands the servo to move however many steps are in the box on the tuning graph window?
Also I notice the "ideal" tuned graph has a very steep ramp up to the commanded number of steps, even when I increase Kp quite a lot the incline of mine is still pretty tame, is that a function of the size of the motor and speed at which it is capable of accelerating or is there more to it than that?
Thanks for answering all my n00b questions I really hope to be making chips soon!