I'm hoping to have a AC servo drive by the fall 09. With the Viper 200 drives having great success in the last year (knock on wood) , I will make a modular drive that has a separate control and 3 phase power board.

It will be available in 200 and 350 volt versions. I'm aiming to drive up to 3 kw motors and run directly from 220vac power.

waitting :)

Excellent. Should be a good spindle drive for smaller machines I would think.

Any idea what cost ballpark we're talking about?

Cheers,

BW

Excellent. Should be a good spindle drive for smaller machines I would think.
It would be a step-servo AC drive to drive Fanuc, Baldor, Yaskawa, etc AC servo motors.
There are already a lot of low priced inverter drives (not closed loop though), You can get a nice japanese 3HP inverter drive for about $200, so i won't be competing with that.

But it could be a spindle drive for a AC motor with an encoder.

Yes, well aware of the inverter drives. But the lack of closed loop is problematic for many applications. Rigid tapping is mentioned a lot, but even things like lining up the ears on the toolholder for a spindle with ATC is difficult with an open loop inverter drive. Torque at low rpm is another issue for such drives.

Cheers,

BW