[Mmpie]

BT30 is definitely nice, although truth to tell, most of the time my BT-30 is holding an adapter for an ER25 collet chuck. Yeah, manual tool changes - but they are SO much cheaper than an ATC ...

Cheers
Roger

Yes, very true. But at least BT30 gives you the option of setting all your tools up prior to a job and changing the whole toolholder in seconds, rather than manually removing the collet, cleaning everything and loading up another one and having to set the Z height every time.

Just a shame a BT30 spindle costs more than this entire machine

Back to the OMIO, engraving mild steel, small ball mill or spot drill? I'm thinking carbide spot drill and taking quite a few passes.


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[dharmic]

I've "engraved" mild steel using the D-bits that came with it. Quotes because it was actually a fine milling operation down about 1.5mm deep. Went through a few cutters as I sussed feeds and speeds but turned out nicely.

Once you get down to that 1mm diameter sort of range you can run the spindle flat out so you have torque aplenty (and much less need for it) so the only thing left to worry about is balancing the feed against the RPM for a decent chip size.

[Mmpie]

Cheers. I have a carbide 6mm spot drill already which I'll probably try to use, or just use up those tiny bits that came with the machine. I'll only be going 0.25mm deep or so, just replacing a rusted chassis number.


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[Mmpie]

Wel I made my first big costly mistake today and took my eye off the machine for as long as it takes to write a text message. I was making a batch of the same part using a tried and tested toolpath, and somewhere during that time the chips had started welding to the bit along a distance of about 20mm. All of a sudden the machine just went silent and stopped dead, no bogging down or skipping, just blink of an eye and goodnight Vienna.

There's seemingly no power going to the spindle or motors, the VFD and PSU both seem to be completely dead, no USB connection to the PC. I've tried different fuses and cables to no avail. I'm guessing whatever happened has bricked the entire electric cabinet


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[Mmpie]

Looking around at what's available locally to get the thing back up and running ASAP. Will try change the VFD and PSU first, fingers crossed the drivers and motion card survived.

Thinking forward to the upgrades I had planned over time can I plug the OMIO stepper drivers into a 68v linear PSU? I see the drivers can't output to the motor with any more than 48v, but I can't see anything about input voltage. I don't know if this is a stupid question but worth asking if it saves me having to buy twice, particularly if the drives are dead and I have to replace them too but I already bought a 48v PSU. As I've already said before my knowledge of anything electrical is... well I don't have any.

VFD I'm looking at is a Bosch EFC5610. Somebody has one just down the road so I can grab it and get started straight away. £180 but has vector control and surely better than the Chinese crap, I'm hoping this could turn out to be money well spent and get a bit of extra performance from the spindle at lower speeds.


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[dharmic]

Did you know: King Midas of the fable had a brother Mmpie who had a similar curse, except everything he touched didn't turn to gold but instead a different kind of brown stuff?

:O

Not been having a great run of late, have you?

All I can suggest is approach this logically. Start at the mains plug and work your way through the system: is the PSU getting mains? (did you accidentally hit the e-stop and not realise? Is there a fuse hiding somewhere on or in the box that's popped?) Is the PSU putting out a voltage? Are the drivers getting it? Is the USB BoB getting power from the computer? Is it doing anything? Is the VFD getting power? and so on.

Hint: If the VFD display is dead that's telling me mains is not getting to your black box's guts.

Hint: Diagnose the issue first, with no thought of what to replace or remedy until you know what's wrong. Otherwise you end up chasing a red herring because that's what you have a fix for and, when it turns out not to be the problem (no matter how hard you tried to make it so) everything just gets sad.

[Mmpie]

Tell me about it! This is just my luck though, I'm used to it. Everything I touch turns to the brown sticky stuff, you're bang on the money there.

I agree and is exactly what I plan on doing bright and early. Tonight I'm just covering bases and finding locally sourced parts so that once the issue is found I already know what I need and who's got it so I can head straight out and get it without messing around finding who's got what. The stepper drivers and BOB don't seem to have any local retailers though so will need to order those online or go for a long drive. There is a little time pressure here, I need to get a one off part ready for a job by the end of next week, hopefully the local machine shop can squeeze it in!

I didn't have time to have a proper look at the symptoms as I had to rush off. In fact it happened right on the home straight, literally the last 30 seconds of a 16 minute toolpath! Talk about a good hard kick in the bollocks. The text message I was writing was "leaving now" which sort of tells you how fast it all happened, I think unless I had my hand on the estop I wouldn't have prevented it anyway. But yeah, I checked all the quick and obvious things, different fuse then different power cable, different USB cable, power off, power on, a gentle tap with the sledgehammer etc. There was no USB connection to the PC, nothing would move, the cooling fan on the box wouldn't power on, the cooling fan on the PSU wouldnt power on, the VFD display wouldn't come on. So I'm pretty certain both the PSU and VFD are dead. Last time when the original PSU died it was exactly the same although the VFD still worked then.

I'm just hoping the BOB and stepper drivers are all good, as figuring out what to put where and how to wire it all up and get it all working smoothly is sure to turn my relaxing weekend into a migraine inducing nightmare.

For what it's worth the plan for the future of this machine is to slowly but surely turn it to a steel framed fixed gantry. By the end I think everything bar the rails would have been changed, I want to go with closed loop steppers or servos purely for the fact so I can have the peace of mind that I CAN look away and be safe in the knowledge the machine isn't skipping steps and getting up to anything naughty whilst I'm not looking. Hence me asking about the 68v PSU.

Edit: I am assuming that 48v is also the max input current but I'm not 100% sure. It would be nice not to have to waste money on a 48v unit when I plan on changing it, and these drivers could well be dead as a dodo anyway.


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[Mmpie]

Well it could have been a lot worse. VFD is dead, the male IEC connection on the back of the box is somehow dead (not sure how, it's just a metal pin sealed in a housing... no sign of damage but no power coming through it) and the cooling fan on the box appears to be dead.

Everything else appears to be ok.

Apparently the Bosch VFD isn't really suitable for this application and I've been recommended some other complex looking thing at the same price instead.

Going to be a laugh programming this


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[extent]

Lenze and Teco Westinghouse drives also looked interesting. Just make sure you get something that supports modbus, that's well worth it.

[Mmpie]

Hitachi was the first thing I looked for as it seems to be what everyone goes with but it's £450 over here ex vat and nobody could supply one for 4 weeks.

So I did a little looking around and found the Bosch but upon actually speaking to a tech they told me it wasn't really suitable and advised I go with a Yaskawa V1000 instead at the same price.

Just been reading through the manual, I think I know what I'm doing with it when I get it tomorrow.


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[extent]

Their driveworks software looks very similar to the Hitachi software, should be super easy to get it going.

[Mmpie]

Their driveworks software looks very similar to the Hitachi software, should be super easy to get it going.

I hope so. It has an auto tuning feature as well which will hopefully make things quicker, easier and more accurate. But that feature needs the motor to be unloaded I think. My like for like replacement spindle should arrive any day now so I'm wondering if I can open this one with the noisy bearings, take the spindle assembly out and auto tune it on this motor before putting the new one in.

What do you think?


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[extent]

wouldn't hurt to play with it, but when you get the new spindle I would start over with the tune, it's not like the identify takes more than about 30 seconds.

[Mmpie]

The manual says auto tuning works best with the motor disconnected from the load, and can only be done connected to a max of 30% of the motors rated load.

I guess it passes the second criteria, given the forces involved when it's actually cutting something, but to meet the first that means disassembling it all.

There are also two stages to the auto tune process. Disconnected from load and then connected to the load for fine tuning.

Guess I can just try it on the old spindle and see how it works.


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[extent]

You must have a different spindle than I'm familiar with. They're like integrated collet chuck, what's to disassemble? Our spindle is only really under load in the cut, and you're not going to tune in the cut. All the load and inertial tuning stuff is going to be for when you're using the vfd to run like a conveyor belt or a big industrial fan or something like that. Even if you have a separate spindle and drive motor the inertial load from the spindle and tool holder is so minuscule relative to the power of the motor I would consider that unloaded

[RCaffin]

Well it could have been a lot worse. VFD is dead, the male IEC connection on the back of the box is somehow dead (not sure how, it's just a metal pin sealed in a housing... no sign of damage but no power coming through it) and the cooling fan on the box appears to be dead.
Um ... just wondering ...
Some IEC sockets contain a fuse. If your primary connection for the CNC comes through one - have you checked it?

Cheers
Roger

[Mmpie]

Extent - I agree, that's what I thought, but the guy reckoned it wouldn't produce good results. That's what it says in the manual too, but I'm sure it will be fine. I did it anyway.

Roger - Actually, yes it did. I did look briefly and somehow missed the well blended in fuse tray. It had a 1.5a fuse that had blown. Oh well, it probably took me less than two minutes to unscrew it and its replacement which was sourced from an old 1990's audio amp rusting away in the loft. This one doesn't have a fuse though, but it does have a built in EMI filter which has tidied up the wiring a little. Maybe I should swap it back?

I'm having a little problem getting the VFD to run/respond to mach3. I can get both the run signals and frequency reference to work but not simultaneously. On the nowforever VFD ground just went to common on the analogue side and seemed to tie to the analogue and digital inputs, or at least the digital input didn't need a common? I don't know. But on the Yaskawa the run command won't work without sending ground to digital common, which then makes the analogue input randomly fluctuate and max out at 350hz. Sending ground to the analogue common stabilises the frequency reference and lets it reach 400hz, but then the run command doesn't work on the digital input. I can just run a jumper between commons, but I want to do it properly. The breakout board also has VR=10v on it, anyone know what this actually is? It went to +12v on the analogue input on the nowforever, I sent it to +V on the Yaskawa (+10.5 max analogue input power supply). It seems to just output 10.55v whenever the USB card is connected.

And also, the frequency compared to the spindle speed command in Mach is far more accurate with this VFD rather than the nowforever. It hits 400hz @ S23100 instead of around S19000. I wonder if this is to do with the VR=10v being 10.5v and the input on the Yaskawa being 10.5 max instead of 12v? And then sticking a resistor or something in to drop that by 0.5v to 10v could sure it up even more?

OR, what seems to be the preferred method - MODBUS. I have absolutely no idea WTF it is, what it does or how it works.My VFD supports RS485 and RS422, whatever they are. I've tried google, I see it's a serial connection, but there are thousands of hits and all seem to be trouble shooting particular issues. Do I need a new breakout board for this? What hardware does it need? Maybe once I have an idea of what it actually is and what components it uses I can fiure out how I'd go about setting it up. Everything I have looked at is nowt but technical gobbledegook.

[extent]

The analog speed ref is supposed to be 0-10v, it shouldn't be hitting 12v. I did find that the stock USB controller reference was just all wrong when i first setup my new VFD, there's some kind of crazy deadband at the bottom, and the scaling just can't be calibrated correctly if you want it anything but kinda close to what it's supposed to be.

I'm not sure what the grounding problem would be, check for voltage between the grounds maybe. All signals need grounding of some kind to work if the circuits are isolated.

Hardware side of modbus is really simple, you just need one of those cheap rs485 serial adapters, and that gets you a differential pair of signal wires to hook up to the VFD, that's it. Modbus bypasses your motion controller and has mach3 talk directly to the VFD through the serial dongle. I did a walk through configuring the Hitachi vfd and setting up mach here. The hardware setup and mach brain configuration would work exactly the same for you, you just need to substitute the command addresses for the ones your VFD uses
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7QT1B0yAfA

[Mmpie]

The analog speed ref is supposed to be 0-10v, it shouldn't be hitting 12v. I did find that the stock USB controller reference was just all wrong when i first setup my new VFD, there's some kind of crazy deadband at the bottom, and the scaling just can't be calibrated correctly if you want it anything but kinda close to what it's supposed to be.

I'm not sure what the grounding problem would be, check for voltage between the grounds maybe. All signals need grounding of some kind to work if the circuits are isolated.

Hardware side of modbus is really simple, you just need one of those cheap rs485 serial adapters, and that gets you a differential pair of signal wires to hook up to the VFD, that's it. Modbus bypasses your motion controller and has mach3 talk directly to the VFD through the serial dongle. I did a walk through configuring the Hitachi vfd and setting up mach here. The hardware setup and mach brain configuration would work exactly the same for you, you just need to substitute the command addresses for the ones your VFD uses
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7QT1B0yAfA

The analogue speed ref is a pretty bang on 10.01v when @ S24000. I must have written it badly, there is a +12v input on the old Chinese VFD which linked up to VR=10v on the BOB. This input is 10.5v max on the new VFD. I'm not really sure what it's for, it's just always putting out 10.55v whenever the USB motion card is plugged in to the PC.

I've got to be honest the analogue reference on this VFD is far more accurate, but it does 'jump' as in to say you might need to bump up the rpm by 500 or so before the frequency changes, depending where abouts in the rpm range you are. It seems to bottom out at 43hz which should be about 2500rpm. 206hz at S12000, which is very close, and not much difference at any speeds I tried.

That is assuming rpm = 120xfreq / motor poles is an accurate way of figuring it out.

The grounding issue is there is only one ground output on the USB motion card but it seems the yaskawa has the digital and analogue input boards on separate grounds. Is it ok to wire a jumper between analogue common and digital common? Or might that cause some ground loop issues?

Thanks for that. Programming and stuff I can stumble from A to B, I just couldn't find out anything about the basics. But I did find out all about the benefits of modbus and am convinced it's the way to go. Is there a preferred method of setting up the rs485 from the PC? I don't mind putting a serial card in my PC, or will one of those £2 USB to rs485 dongles do just the trick?


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[dharmic]

The analogue speed ref is a pretty bang on 10.01v when @ S24000. I must have written it badly, there is a +12v input on the old Chinese VFD which linked up to VR=10v on the BOB. This input is 10.5v max on the new VFD. I'm not really sure what it's for, it's just always putting out 10.55v whenever the USB motion card is plugged in to the PC.

The Vref to GND voltage from the VFD can be divided via a potentiometer and fed back into the analogue speed input. In the case of the YongNuo breakout, they chop that Vref via PWM, smooth it via an RC filter and push that voltage back to the VFD.

The grounding issue is there is only one ground output on the USB motion card but it seems the yaskawa has the digital and analogue input boards on separate grounds. Is it ok to wire a jumper between analogue common and digital common? Or might that cause some ground loop issues?

You should be ok doing this