Hi Dominic, It would seem to me that if your goal is to teach vets how to retrofit or build cnc machine tools, you would do well to use current technology that they could obtain to perform jobs after they are done with your program.
Currently available hardware for LinuxCNC use is primarily Mesa Electronics, Pico Electronics, or Ethercat based industrial drives. Computers used can be modern x86 64 bit machines with ethernet, pci-e, or pci interface, or Raspberry Pi 4B single board computers. Reverse engineering a 20 year old ISA bus card would not seem to be the best use of time in my opinion. I don't think designing your own thyristor-based motor drives makes much sense either, since good MOSFET-based commercial drives are readily available at modest prices. -- Ralph ________________________________________ From: Dominic Francisco [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, April 1, 2022 11:57 AM To: Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC) Subject: [Emc-users] mfg of Servo To Go motion board CAUTION: This email originated from outside the Walla Walla University email system. Big Howdy to the Group: Our 501, C-19 non-profit, veteransinitiatives.org, is a small school, composed of MilVets who have defended this priceless Nation. Our backrouinds include : Machining, Founding, Patternmaking, Metallurgy, Physical Chemistry, Heat Treat, Ceramics: a bunch of reprobate motor-heads, hot-rodders & gear-heads, who remain convinced, even in our advanced state of degradation, that we shall continue our mfg school to place our warriors in our Nation's mfg sector. We purchased one of these splendid, STG motion boards some years ago to update the control of a 12klb, 1978, 4-axis Monarch VMC; worked like a champ! This STG board was capable of 8-Axis with a servo update time of 1 ms. we retained the original thyristor amplifier which could output ~400 A & 300 V on start-up. the worktable capacity was ~1600lbs! our for-profit side regularly whittled out SAE- 4000 series steels for industry. We sold that VMC to some DisAbled American Veterans (DAV's) we had trained in our NP & started farming-out work to them, mostly DoD forgings & castings. We are now primarily a non-profit helping our warriors find meaningful employment in our Nation to bring mfg back to the USofA. Now we find that the STG firm went out of biz, with the un-fortunate death of its inventor & mfg. now whattarwegonnado? We got us 2 plans: purchase several used STG boards to continue teaching digital control & machine tool rebuilding to our most deserving citizen, our DAV's. we have also interviewed some ambulatory paralyzed veterans (PVA's) to join in. The other crazed choice, is to start mfg the STG board from scratch. some of our volunteers have experience in industry mfg circuit boards. we could whittle-out frames to silk screen the traces & set up one of our small mills to NC the holes. We have mfg about 50 small circuit cards for the thyristor amps. these control the beefy thyristors: zero-crossing detector, gate control, switching, BEMF damping & small-signal routing when reversing the axis (S-curves on start-up & when approaching the end of axis & corners). Some of the EMC crew out there may have some suggestions on another control board (or combination of control cards) we could mfg. We are committed to mfg a motion control system. just think of what our warriors could learn in this esoteric atmosphere; consider their employment choices! We hope to hear from you EMC, LINUX.org & CNC.org participants in this technical worthy endeavor. May God protect our valiant warriors, don anders patrick callahan giovanni bertoni nora o'neille sean finnegan [email protected] veteransinitiatives.org + _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flists.sourceforge.net%2Flists%2Flistinfo%2Femc-users&data=04%7C01%7Cralph.stirling%40wallawalla.edu%7C68a4b9c55d964449615708da1411904d%7Cd958f048e43142779c8debfb75e7aa64%7C0%7C1%7C637844362922443786%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=5uIrKeM25x%2FayosWH%2FmH6mOJ5FLayxAlR4MMVePMnsY%3D&reserved=0 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
