[TremFab]

Hello Everyone, I'm in a bit of a jam with this project. (this is the story, the questions are in the second paragraph) I have a Supermax knee mill that had an Anilam Crusader II CNC conversion on it. after much deliberation I decided to go the path of least cost first and try to repair the beast. wrong idea. replacement parts are expensive. I didn't want to waste time and money trying to resurrect an "archaic" machine. so I decided to do what nearly every inquisitive adventurous person would do. Instead of replacing the button matrix and having a machine that is hard to use and time consuming to run I decided to spend a little more money and convert it to run on a Dynomotion Kflop/Kanalog PC based system. After a bit of tinkering I got everything to communicate with each other. glass scales appear to work beautifully. I got all my servos to power up and hold position. (until I power up the k flop/ K analog boards, then they wander. I'm sure that is just a function of tuning.) I have removed ALL of the original Anilam electronics from the head unit. I used the enclosure to house the motion controller and power supply and various interfaces for my glass scales and such. used a PC power supply to juice up the motion controller boards and glass scales independently from the controlling PC. (I heard horror stories about powering it from the PC itself) Finally Mounted a flat screen monitor on the front and now it all looks like it kind of belongs there. I will post pictures of everything if i can figure out how.

Everything has come down to programming this animal and I don't have a CLUE where to start. I have a couple resources with c programming experience that have looked at it but they have no experience when it comes to machinery. so its the blind leading the blind. I have searched rather thoroughly across the internet and haven't found anything too helpful. Does anyone have kind of a "step buy step" type of layout of what has to me done to tune motors and glass scales and program this all to work with Mach 3? I was advised by Tom from Dynomotion, said that this would be the best option because I'm probably not the first or last to need this sort of help. He said that the first step is getting a motor to servo using kmotion.exe. I'm not totally lost as what this means but DOING it is a different story. I would assume that with the versatility of these motion controllers there is no "one way" to do it. Additionally I'm sure I'm missing something rather simple.

I really appreciate any and all help I could get. Thanks to all who have read through this, I will get Pictures up as soon as I can. Hopefully this thread can solve more than just my problems.

Thanks again!
-WT

[Ventana]

WT,
I have done this conversion. You don't have to write any C programs for this if you preserved the original drives. I have the manual for the drives my SuperMax used. The Axis drift is due to differences in the +-10V signal to the servo motor drives. The first thing you have do is to disable the axis channel on the KMotion Axis screen. Then you balance the the drive using the balance pot on the drive. You shouldn't mess with any of the other pots unless the drift is out of range of the balance pot. Once the drift is zero'd, and the channel is re-enabled it will still dither. To get rid of this you need to increase the dead band on the Step Response Screen. I only needed 1 count. If you are still struggling with the servo tuning I can send you what I used.
Paul