I need to manufacture some nylon cams and need to add a rotary axis to my mill.
Plan: Take a standard 6 or 8" Horizontal/ Vertical rotary table and convert it to CNC by the addition of a servo motor and decoder. I do not see any problems with this conversion and have all the tools at hand to do the mechanics.
The CNC'd rotary table then needs to be interfaced with the controll - and that's where i go (DUH??)
My controll is a Anilam GXM (grusader g) and the servo drives used for the other 3 axis are " DC Servo Amplifier Type 415"
On the controll side i have:
1. A black board accepting inputs from the encoders with U and S still unocupied. (W is used for the readout on the knee of the mill and well X Y and Z is obvious)
2. A Red card with the output sognals for X, Y and Z as well as a ribbon cable marked D/A for controlling coolant on/off, spindle F/R/off etc.
3. A blue card with U, W ans S analog outputs, of which only S is used to controll spindle speed. This card also has a ribbon cable marked EXP and from schematics it seems to be connected to the limit switches and M, S and T strobe inputs.
I can access all the parameters in the controll to set up U as a rotary axis and to set parameters like DIV U, + and - limits for U, rot U etc. and i think that it should be doable to set it up.
Now for the questions....
Do i need to use the same model of servo amp, or would something like a gecho do the trick? (the current amps have the following connections:
= bus
- Bus
+ armature
- Armature
+ 24 V DC
0V
-24 V DC
+ tach
- Tach
Fault
-15 v DC
0v
+15 V dc
enable
- command
+ command
Then there are test points for: Current, Tach, Command and 0V
and also tuning pots for Offset and command gain.
What size servo do i need for a 6 or 8 inch rotary table and would you advise that i gear it down and loose some speed? (i think 90 turns/ rev is standard for that size table)
I suppose i would also have to set up a limit switch on the table for indexing purposes? (and interface that to the controll) I do seem to have a number of D/A and EXP points spare, but how would these be configured in the controll?
I suppose that's enough questions for now.
Thanks
Pieter