What do you guys think. I just bought an 1999 Sharp TMV knee mill with Anilam 3300MK controller. Servo motors and ground ball screws. The machine and everything looks good. Very little use on it. Im so use to using Mach II and III with G320 drivers. Im wondering if it would make more since to stick with what I know. Abandon the 10 year old control system. It’s in good shape. I just don’t have a lot of time to learn a new system and get my PC to talk with it. Is there any performance advantage staying with an industrial Anilam type controller. Will Mach and G320's do the same job?

Thanks for any comments

Jeremy

The anilam will run another 10 yrs without too much trouble and a fairly large group of software engineers/mechanical engineers have done their best to idiot proof the control system's software.

For me it's a slum dunk - I'd keep the anilam and inveast in some good CAM software and starts making chips

thanks joe

I think you should think twice about abandoning a functional industrial control sytem for Mach. Most industrial control systems use a feedback system that makes use of a resolver and an encoder for the control loops. Drives run in velocity mode on one feedback loop and get wrapped with a position loop to the control system.

The strategy has advantages because the velocity is monitored independently of position. It works well when it comes to low speed linearity as well as using scales for feedback. (if you have them) You can/could put something like this together with EMC and possibly Mach but it would take more effort than learning the Anilam either way.

Find someone in your part of the woods that uses the Anilam and see if you can get a lesson on it. I think you'll save yourself alot of time in the long run.