[crazybrit]

I just picked this machine up and was hoping to use this thread to collect information about the 2500 variant. Anyone who has a 2500 is welcome to post here and maybe we can share ideas.

There is very little information existing about the 2500. It is documented in the 2000 manual but there is no mention of it in the ISO archive of Intelitek internal documentation. Intellitek told me that they sold one 2500 for every thirty 2000s.

Right now it's sitting outside waiting for me to make space inside my shop where I can then see if it powers up.

The 2500 has a 42,000rpm direct drive spindle. The 2000 had a 5000 or 10,000 rpm belt driven spindle. According to the manual the 2500 uses an "EX16 spindle taper" and originally came with an "1/8-inch EX16 collet". I've read that sometimes the more common ER15 collet can be mounted in place of an EX16. Otherwise the only seller of EX16 collets I've found is: https://shop.fischerspindle.com/Collets/UPEX16/de

My machine is a later revision with the R2 backpack for the electronics. All the other 2500s I've seen pictures of had the earlier R1 backpack. The R2 backpack is wider than the R1 and the R2 has the power button mounted on the front of the backpack. On this 2500 the VFD (a Siemens) is mounted inside the R2 backpack. The earlier 2500 using the R1 backpack had a separate Lumi Drive FU2000 VFD mounted externally. The 2000 existed with R1 and R2 backpacks also, on the R2 version the spindle control pcb resides where the Siemens VFD sits on the 2500.

I'm hoping to locate a used 1000/2000 spindle head that I can retrofit onto the 2500 to allow a more modern spindle/tooling plus powered drawbar, tool changing etc. If anyone knows of one I'd welcome a PM. Intelitek have none.

Also since I'm a Linux software engineer my plan is to try and decode the serial protocol used to talk to the Animatronics and add support to Linux CNC.

[crazybrit]

Well. Life took over with 1001 tangents and I only finally now got the machine up and going.

Running into "communication errors" whenever (in manual mode) I try and move the axis. They do move though X is very choppy. Oddly I can vary the spindle rpm freely without getting any comms errors.

On the plus side the VFD, spindle and 2 axis works. I read posts where others have bought 2500 only to find the VFD is bad.

I did make a new shield for it. The original one had cracked and had been repaired with lots of duct tape

[GenghisJohn]

Howdy! I'm joining the club. Just picked one of these up last week. I've been trying to read the manual etc and then figure out how I'm going to run software.... I may end up getting some "Acorn" hardware from CentroidCNC