Gentlemen,
I don't remember what the issues were in the late delivery of the overnight order, mentioned in the above post. Occasionally, my inventory runs short here in Missouri. The way USA orders are processed is, that when the order is placed on the Rutex web site, it is emailed to me overnight. I have almost a perfect record of shipping all orders for products I have in stock.
I provide limited phone support for USA customers. We prefer to answer technical questions through the Rutex.com web site email links. That way, the Australian engineer gets to look at the questions along with me. If I feel that the question is a little beyond my experience level, I ask the Australian engineer to take the call. This works pretty well.
I use a lot of Rutex drives in machinery that my sons and I build. You can take a quick look at some of the machines we produce on his new web site,
www.machinesolutions.biz. We use the Rutex drives on the lathe control we put on the lathes pictured on his web site. We have many of these machines running all over the USA, and they are very reliable. Our experience with the Rutex products and support has been good, but I offered to provide quicker support and shipping in the USA, and last Fall, we began to ship for USA customers, and take phone calls for technical support.
No one should have trouble setting up Rutex drives. The Rutex web site has an excellent set up and tune downloadable paper which has information which will help anyone setting up step and direction servo loops.
The revision 2 drives used an spi interface for tuning. Occasionally a user's PC and drives failed to synchronize properly while the PC was coming up. A power off and on of the Rutex drives provided a reset and re-established communication between the pd and the drive being tuned. Thereafter the spi works fine. This was only an issue while tuning the drive in spi mode. There are no issues related to the normal operation of the drive in step and direction mode. The new version (F) of the drives do not have this tuning issue. They have a number of new features which we are excited about. I expect they will be in production within a couple of weeks.
The Rutex drives are, in my opinion, fault free, unless you have a following error of greater than 32,000 steps. The Revision 2 drives initiate an error signal if the following error exceeds more than 1024 steps, but the drive does not fault, or loose its position. The revision F drives allow the customer to choose the following error limit in incriments starting with 256, 512, 1024 etc. I am expecting that in the rev F. drives, the customer will be able to run the drive in step and direction mode and read the encoder count register through the spi communications as well. I have not tested the rev. F drives myself yet, but the preliminary information on them has me excited. More precise tuning ability is also expected.
I hope this helps.
Tom Eldredge,
Rutex Support, USA
(573) 341 1528