[tcom-frazzled]

I have a yaskawa driven harmonic drive system that I would like to be able to use as a 4th axis on a custom-built cnc router. Having given some thought to how one might interface such a thing, it begs the question of whether or not there is any way to directly interface the fanuc control to the yaskawa drive in a manner that would allow it to show up as a contollable axis? while it would be nice to be able to use it without limitations, I would be happy with just being able to use basic indexer functions.

The Yaskawa drive I have for this includes the optional indexer module, so I can interface it several ways. For basic indexer functionality, the most promising looks to be a direct serial connection that I could run to the second serial port on the control. The drive then uses a command/response language where the control could issue (using POPEN, DPRINT, PCLOS):

POS 1638400 (16 bit encoder, 50:1 reduction, this would rotate 90 degrees)

The indexer responds:

1OK (Drive 1 OK, when command completes)

Can anyone shed any additional light on whether or not there is a means to directly interface third party hardware like this with the control/PMC in a manner that would allow the rotary unit to be considered an axis? Is there any way to have a program halt execution and wait for the incoming OK response before continuing?

[tcom-frazzled]

Correction. The output to the indexer would be:

POS 1638400
SPD XXXX
ST