OmioCNC report

[extent]

Lenze and Teco Westinghouse drives also looked interesting. Just make sure you get something that supports modbus, that's well worth it.

[Mmpie]

Hitachi was the first thing I looked for as it seems to be what everyone goes with but it's £450 over here ex vat and nobody could supply one for 4 weeks.

So I did a little looking around and found the Bosch but upon actually speaking to a tech they told me it wasn't really suitable and advised I go with a Yaskawa V1000 instead at the same price.

Just been reading through the manual, I think I know what I'm doing with it when I get it tomorrow.


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[extent]

Their driveworks software looks very similar to the Hitachi software, should be super easy to get it going.

[Mmpie]

Their driveworks software looks very similar to the Hitachi software, should be super easy to get it going.

I hope so. It has an auto tuning feature as well which will hopefully make things quicker, easier and more accurate. But that feature needs the motor to be unloaded I think. My like for like replacement spindle should arrive any day now so I'm wondering if I can open this one with the noisy bearings, take the spindle assembly out and auto tune it on this motor before putting the new one in.

What do you think?


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[extent]

wouldn't hurt to play with it, but when you get the new spindle I would start over with the tune, it's not like the identify takes more than about 30 seconds.

[Mmpie]

The manual says auto tuning works best with the motor disconnected from the load, and can only be done connected to a max of 30% of the motors rated load.

I guess it passes the second criteria, given the forces involved when it's actually cutting something, but to meet the first that means disassembling it all.

There are also two stages to the auto tune process. Disconnected from load and then connected to the load for fine tuning.

Guess I can just try it on the old spindle and see how it works.


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[extent]

You must have a different spindle than I'm familiar with. They're like integrated collet chuck, what's to disassemble? Our spindle is only really under load in the cut, and you're not going to tune in the cut. All the load and inertial tuning stuff is going to be for when you're using the vfd to run like a conveyor belt or a big industrial fan or something like that. Even if you have a separate spindle and drive motor the inertial load from the spindle and tool holder is so minuscule relative to the power of the motor I would consider that unloaded

[RCaffin]

Well it could have been a lot worse. VFD is dead, the male IEC connection on the back of the box is somehow dead (not sure how, it's just a metal pin sealed in a housing... no sign of damage but no power coming through it) and the cooling fan on the box appears to be dead.
Um ... just wondering ...
Some IEC sockets contain a fuse. If your primary connection for the CNC comes through one - have you checked it?

Cheers
Roger

[Mmpie]

Extent - I agree, that's what I thought, but the guy reckoned it wouldn't produce good results. That's what it says in the manual too, but I'm sure it will be fine. I did it anyway.

Roger - Actually, yes it did. I did look briefly and somehow missed the well blended in fuse tray. It had a 1.5a fuse that had blown. Oh well, it probably took me less than two minutes to unscrew it and its replacement which was sourced from an old 1990's audio amp rusting away in the loft. This one doesn't have a fuse though, but it does have a built in EMI filter which has tidied up the wiring a little. Maybe I should swap it back?

I'm having a little problem getting the VFD to run/respond to mach3. I can get both the run signals and frequency reference to work but not simultaneously. On the nowforever VFD ground just went to common on the analogue side and seemed to tie to the analogue and digital inputs, or at least the digital input didn't need a common? I don't know. But on the Yaskawa the run command won't work without sending ground to digital common, which then makes the analogue input randomly fluctuate and max out at 350hz. Sending ground to the analogue common stabilises the frequency reference and lets it reach 400hz, but then the run command doesn't work on the digital input. I can just run a jumper between commons, but I want to do it properly. The breakout board also has VR=10v on it, anyone know what this actually is? It went to +12v on the analogue input on the nowforever, I sent it to +V on the Yaskawa (+10.5 max analogue input power supply). It seems to just output 10.55v whenever the USB card is connected.

And also, the frequency compared to the spindle speed command in Mach is far more accurate with this VFD rather than the nowforever. It hits 400hz @ S23100 instead of around S19000. I wonder if this is to do with the VR=10v being 10.5v and the input on the Yaskawa being 10.5 max instead of 12v? And then sticking a resistor or something in to drop that by 0.5v to 10v could sure it up even more?

OR, what seems to be the preferred method - MODBUS. I have absolutely no idea WTF it is, what it does or how it works.My VFD supports RS485 and RS422, whatever they are. I've tried google, I see it's a serial connection, but there are thousands of hits and all seem to be trouble shooting particular issues. Do I need a new breakout board for this? What hardware does it need? Maybe once I have an idea of what it actually is and what components it uses I can fiure out how I'd go about setting it up. Everything I have looked at is nowt but technical gobbledegook.

[extent]

The analog speed ref is supposed to be 0-10v, it shouldn't be hitting 12v. I did find that the stock USB controller reference was just all wrong when i first setup my new VFD, there's some kind of crazy deadband at the bottom, and the scaling just can't be calibrated correctly if you want it anything but kinda close to what it's supposed to be.

I'm not sure what the grounding problem would be, check for voltage between the grounds maybe. All signals need grounding of some kind to work if the circuits are isolated.

Hardware side of modbus is really simple, you just need one of those cheap rs485 serial adapters, and that gets you a differential pair of signal wires to hook up to the VFD, that's it. Modbus bypasses your motion controller and has mach3 talk directly to the VFD through the serial dongle. I did a walk through configuring the Hitachi vfd and setting up mach here. The hardware setup and mach brain configuration would work exactly the same for you, you just need to substitute the command addresses for the ones your VFD uses

[Mmpie]

The analog speed ref is supposed to be 0-10v, it shouldn't be hitting 12v. I did find that the stock USB controller reference was just all wrong when i first setup my new VFD, there's some kind of crazy deadband at the bottom, and the scaling just can't be calibrated correctly if you want it anything but kinda close to what it's supposed to be.

I'm not sure what the grounding problem would be, check for voltage between the grounds maybe. All signals need grounding of some kind to work if the circuits are isolated.

Hardware side of modbus is really simple, you just need one of those cheap rs485 serial adapters, and that gets you a differential pair of signal wires to hook up to the VFD, that's it. Modbus bypasses your motion controller and has mach3 talk directly to the VFD through the serial dongle. I did a walk through configuring the Hitachi vfd and setting up mach here. The hardware setup and mach brain configuration would work exactly the same for you, you just need to substitute the command addresses for the ones your VFD uses

The analogue speed ref is a pretty bang on 10.01v when @ S24000. I must have written it badly, there is a +12v input on the old Chinese VFD which linked up to VR=10v on the BOB. This input is 10.5v max on the new VFD. I'm not really sure what it's for, it's just always putting out 10.55v whenever the USB motion card is plugged in to the PC.

I've got to be honest the analogue reference on this VFD is far more accurate, but it does 'jump' as in to say you might need to bump up the rpm by 500 or so before the frequency changes, depending where abouts in the rpm range you are. It seems to bottom out at 43hz which should be about 2500rpm. 206hz at S12000, which is very close, and not much difference at any speeds I tried.

That is assuming rpm = 120xfreq / motor poles is an accurate way of figuring it out.

The grounding issue is there is only one ground output on the USB motion card but it seems the yaskawa has the digital and analogue input boards on separate grounds. Is it ok to wire a jumper between analogue common and digital common? Or might that cause some ground loop issues?

Thanks for that. Programming and stuff I can stumble from A to B, I just couldn't find out anything about the basics. But I did find out all about the benefits of modbus and am convinced it's the way to go. Is there a preferred method of setting up the rs485 from the PC? I don't mind putting a serial card in my PC, or will one of those £2 USB to rs485 dongles do just the trick?


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[dharmic]

The analogue speed ref is a pretty bang on 10.01v when @ S24000. I must have written it badly, there is a +12v input on the old Chinese VFD which linked up to VR=10v on the BOB. This input is 10.5v max on the new VFD. I'm not really sure what it's for, it's just always putting out 10.55v whenever the USB motion card is plugged in to the PC.

The Vref to GND voltage from the VFD can be divided via a potentiometer and fed back into the analogue speed input. In the case of the YongNuo breakout, they chop that Vref via PWM, smooth it via an RC filter and push that voltage back to the VFD.

The grounding issue is there is only one ground output on the USB motion card but it seems the yaskawa has the digital and analogue input boards on separate grounds. Is it ok to wire a jumper between analogue common and digital common? Or might that cause some ground loop issues?

You should be ok doing this

[RCaffin]

This one doesn't have a fuse though, but it does have a built in EMI filter which has tidied up the wiring a little. Maybe I should swap it back?
I would prefer to have both the fuse AND the EMI filter. Having a good filter right at the main input means spikes from other motors (eg compressors) don't make nearly as many problems. Worth the expense imho.

I put spike suppression capacitors across the compressor switch, a very solid mains filter at the input to the PC/CNC rig, and the compressor on a different phase from the CNC. The compressor cycles all day when I am machining and causes zero problems - now.

Cheers
Roger

[Udo_Baumgart]

Hi,
ModBus ist a good choice for controlling a vfd. I did this for my Nowforever E100 and put a description on my web page:

ubit-rc.de

Should be easily adoptable for other vfd's.

Ciao, Udo

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[Mmpie]

Dharmic - that couldn't have made less sense to me if it was written in Chinese ... lol

Roger - I wondered about that. The manufacturer put an EMI filter in but it was after separating the motor PSU and VFD power feeds at the e-stop and thought there must be a reason why? The fuse was only 1.5a and there is one in the plug, is it necessary? There's one in the wall plug if the inverter tries to pull more than it should. And tying in to:

Udo - modbus might be a good choice if you're on an intellectual level with Albert Einstein. I've just wasted a day of my life which I will never get back. I just cannot make sense out of the registry addresses and functions and commands and turning them into a useful format that Mach3 can use.

If I can get modbus to work I can use it to trigger the estop if the VFD tries to pull too much current, although strictly speaking shouldn't the VFD be limiting the current to whatever I set the limit to anyway?

Edit: in fact if anyone knows anything about ModBus and fancies tickling their brain a bit, I started a thread on it

https://r.tapatalk.com/shareLink?sha...0&share_type=t


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[extent]

If the drive faults due to overcurrent it's probably because it's stalled and not spinning anyway, makes good sense to estop the machine any time there's a drive fault.

[RCaffin]

Why they put the EMI filter where they did - I would not have a clue. Sorry.
You should have at least one fuse in the power to the machine. Having two makes little difference. Note: we don't fuse our power cables here in Oz, but I believe some other countries do. Six of one, ...

Modbus: I don't use it. I find an ESS has quite enough pins. I think it is now a slightly obsolete idea - unless you are running an industrial control system with 100 inputs.

eStop: my own biased opinion is that all fault signals should be handled by external hardware, NOT by Mach. That external HW can then tell Mach that the system has stopped. But setting that up requires some electronics.

Cheers
Roger

[Udo_Baumgart]

The main advantage of using modbus is that the communication is bidirectional. You can control the spindle AND e.g. get output frequence, current, voltage, inverter temperature and error conditions and show them in mach3.

I spend a couple of days googling through the net until i started understanding how ModBus works with Mach3. It is complicated but manageable. I tried to explain everything on my website with a little more detail then i have found in other places in the web.

Currently my Mach3 shows the output frequency of the inverter, output current and vdf temperature on the Mach3 screen. And of course Mach3 controls spindle rpm and direction. After understanding how this works it took me less than an hour to set it up.

Analogue output 0-10V or PWM have a problem: There is no real linear dependency between voltage and rpm. If you have a 24000 rpm spindle and set output to 5 V this does not mean that the spindle turns with 12000 rpm. With ModBus i can be sure that if i send 200 Hz the output frequency really is set to 200 Hz.

Ciao, Udo

[Mmpie]

Udo, reading your guide has started clearing it up more for me. It also helps that the nowforever modbus functions and registers are very similar to the ones in my Yaskawa.

I think if you add a few little pointers to binary, hex and decimal code, how to tell them apart and how to reach the correct format for Mach3 and I think you have a complete and easy to follow guide for any uninitiated to understand what they need and apply it to any VFD.

Thanks for taking the time to write that up.


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[chucka103]

Hi guys
I think I've asked this before .. not sure. Has anyone upgraded to a BT30 spindle?
If so any recommendations?
Cheers


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