I purchased my 2 axis Eagle mill (now a 4 axis) from a large local manufacture as surplus equipment. The mill is in excellent shape as it was only used in their prototype shop. It came with an Anilam M controller. It worked but had some issues, mainly a failing power supply, and was generally clunky. It has Baldor DC servos with 1525 drives.
About a year after purchase, it finally failed right in the middle of a production job.....So time for a controls upgrade. I have 20 some years experience in motion control and had already written the CNC operator interface, and control program for my CNC router so it was not much of a stretch to install the same system on the mill. I had a Galil DMC-1846 4 axis motion controller on the shelf along with the rest of the needed hardware so I was able to complete the upgrade in about a day and a half and be back up and running. I was in a hurry, the customer was waiting on the parts.
Galil 18x6 PCI bus motion controllers
I didn't get any ''before'' pictures of the control cabinet, but this picture is after the panel was gutted and the new interface boards installed. The drives and the rest of the hardware on the bottom and the right side is original equipment. The lower green breakout is the main connection, above that are 8 opto-relays, and above that is a 24 position Grayhill I/O rack for the auxiliary I/O if needed for later additions. The Galil card has up to 80 uncommitted I/O points in addition to travel and home limit inputs for each axis, and dual encoder inputs for each axis. Then it was just a matter of connecting the wiring to the proper terminals.
I decided to hang a desktop computer case in the panel just so I could have the mechanical support for the PCI boards. I could have done something different but that would have required actual thought and design.:idea:
The only problem was the desktop case was too big to fit in the cabinet
No problem, a little body work fixed that
Now it fits, I didn't need the drive bays anyway
While I was at it, I installed Renishaw 1um magnetic scales on the X, Y, and Knee axis, Z (quill) axis will come later
See that build here: http://www.cnczone.com/forums/knee-v...ml#post1977204
Yes, the mill needs cleaning Aluminum chips get all over everything.
Then all I needed to do was hang a keyboard and monitor on the machine. I went with a big monitor because my old eyes don't see as well as they used to.
Then a little motor tuning and debug and I was up and running again. I didn't even take the job off of the table while I did the upgrade.
Here is a screenshot of the operator interface as it is today with the 4th (Rotary) axis. The Z and R axis are red because they turned off in this picture. The quill can be operated manually or under computer control by flipping a lever. The machine can be operated as a manual machine, as a 2 axis, 3 axis or 4 axis with changeover done in seconds.