Need Help!- Converting an old Routermaster RM25 to Mach system.

[SOSx]

Hi All,

I am just starting a new company based in the UK designing audio systems.
We have just bought an old (1999) Router Master RM25 to try and speed up
prototyping. But now we have the machine we are a bit lost. it seems like an archaic system the machine runs on. It came with enroute 2.2 2d, and camplot. It all seems very cluncky! And dificult to get your head around.
It seems that you have to upload the operating system to the unit before every program, then control the unit via a numeric key pad?

We are well versed in CAD design but (as i'm sure you can tell) are completely new to CNC programing!!

After a few searches I found this site and a couple of threads related to the subject of converting the machine to run with Mach software. I have seen that there are a couple of people on here who have either converted their machines or looked at doing it.

Here is the best thread I could find!

http://cnczone.com/forums/showthread...ht=rm25+router

Now this is what We need to do I think?
Here are a few images of the machine as it is.










What are all the different comonents here?

What would need to be changed?

I hope someone on here is able to help as I feel it could be a long learning process as it is!

Kindest Regards

Tim

[SOSx]

Originally Posted by SOSx Hi David, I have just recently bought the same machine (RM25) and having exactly the same issues as you were.

Actually Dennis was the one with the RM25, but it seems like they are all very close in the electronics side of the house. Only the mechanical parts are different.

Originally Posted by SOSx I just started this thread Need Help! Converting an old Routermaster RM25 to Mach system. - CNCzone.com-The Largest Machinist Community on the net! trying to get help doing the same thing.

If you wouldn't mind, will you cut and paste your reply here into the forum posting rather than keeping this a private e-mail thread. Everyone benefits from a discussion and stepping through the issues as we find them and work through them.

Originally Posted by SOSx Is there any chance you could explain the process to me. I am completely new to CNC programing and am unfamiliar with the hardware terminology.

No issues here, I also had a "less than useful" machine and brought it back to life. I have to admit though I am fairly technical being a SW manager and involved in motherboard design for Intel in a former life.

Originally Posted by SOSx Is this the unit you purchased? B: KL-6050-48 3 Axis CNC Stepper Motor Driver Controller: $669

Yep that is the exact unit I purchased.

Originally Posted by SOSx Any help would be kindly appreciated as at the moment I feel we have bought an un-usable machine almost. How are you getting on with yours now that you have converted it? What work do you use it for?

Mine is working great now. After a few "accidents" with the limit switches. It's really important not to swap the wires on the X and Y limit switches. Ouch!

The biggest decision has been the choice of software to generate designs (CAD) and toolpaths (CAM). In the end, I selected TurboCAD Platinum for the CAD portion, but Alibre Design Pro is a less expensive alternative that has great after sales support. For the CAM portion, I was torn between Vectric VCarvePro, Vectric Aspire, and ArtCAM Express. In the end I choose Vectric VCarvePro. It was the cheapest package and can be upgraded later at a reasonable price. ArtCAM would have been a better choice if I could have afforded their "Pro" package, but for $7K, it is not in my budget at this time (maybe ever). But whatever you do, do NOT get sucked into BobCAD-CAM. The learning curve it too steep. It may be great if you have a CNC metal Mill, but it is overkill for CNC Routers and you will pull your hair out with their user interface.

As I said, please post your orginal private message over to the forum posting so we can step through the process and every one can benefit from the walkthrough.

-David

[SOSx]

Reply from David, Actually Dennis was the one with the RM25, but it seems like they are all very close in the electronics side of the house. Only the mechanical parts are different.

My apologies for the confusion is yours the RM52?

Originally Posted by SOSx Is there any chance you could explain the process to me. I am completely new to CNC programing and am unfamiliar with the hardware terminology. Reply from David, No issues here, I also had a "less than useful" machine and brought it back to life. I have to admit though I am fairly technical being a SW manager and involved in motherboard design for Intel in a former life.

I hope we wont be to slow as students. We have reasonable level of technical knowledge of Cad design, Electronics/electronic assembly and computer software (although I must admit coming from very different fields of application!). I feel that relating the terminology used is going to be one of the steepest learning curves.

Originally Posted by SOSx Is this the unit you purchased? B: KL-6050-48 3 Axis CNC Stepper Motor Driver Controller: $669

Reply from David, Yep that is the exact unit I purchased.

Did you/are there any other units to concider?

Originally Posted by SOSx How are you getting on with yours now that you have converted it?

Reply from David, Mine is working great now. After a few "accidents" with the limit switches. It's really important not to swap the wires on the X and Y limit switches. Ouch!

Excuse my ignorance once again! What are the Limit switches and there use?
I believe you said you bought extra limit switches for your unit?

Originally posted by David, The biggest decision has been the choice of software to generate designs (CAD) and toolpaths (CAM). In the end, I selected TurboCAD Platinum for the CAD portion, but Alibre Design Pro is a less expensive alternative that has great after sales support. For the CAM portion, I was torn between Vectric VCarvePro, Vectric Aspire, and ArtCAM Express. In the end I choose Vectric VCarvePro. It was the cheapest package and can be upgraded later at a reasonable price. ArtCAM would have been a better choice if I could have afforded their "Pro" package, but for $7K, it is not in my budget at this time (maybe ever). But whatever you do, do NOT get sucked into BobCAD-CAM. The learning curve it too steep. It may be great if you have a CNC metal Mill, but it is overkill for CNC Routers and you will pull your hair out with their user interface.

As for the CAD side of things, we use Autocad and Smart for all of our design work. I will have a look at the options you have mentioned above regarding the CAM side of things! If you or anybody else has views on the positive and negatives of these packages we would be interested in all comments!

I presume lazy cam/Lazy cam pro from ArtSoft is too basic?

We have been having our designs CNC Machined (by third party) for several years now. But when prototyping we have found both the time constraints and Costs prohibitive. We really hope that this machine can refine this process massively.

Any way I look forward to discussing and learning this subject further.

Kindest Regards

Tim

[dpenley]

Okay Tim, let's take this step by step. I'll go over what I did and hopefully others will add in their knowledge of what you should do differently .

The machine I have is the CAMTech RouterMaster II. It is a 5’x10’x5” capacity machine and weighs enough so that I only trust it on a concrete slab floor. I had originally purchased the unit from a sign shop that had upgraded to a newer machine with better production capabilities.

As received, the machine had all the stock items. Computer with CAMTech’s DOS based ToolPath software and what I believe is a RS-485 board. I was never clear on what protocol ran on this board. Someone told me it was proprietary, while another said it was Modbus. For me it didn’t matter because the interface board was ISA. Remember ISA? It was in the original IBM PC and was eventually eclipsed by PCI. Since there are no new machines that have ISA bus, I didn’t want my big machine stuck because a 20 year old ISA card dies.

The first thing I did was as you did. Post on CNCZone. Fantastic resource! Dennis pointed in the right direction.

The first purchases are the triplet – parallel port breakout board, power supply and stepper motor drivers. I went back and forth on which ones to purchase, but ultimately just took the quick solution of purchasing the Keling KL-6050-48 3 Axis CNC Stepper Motor Driver Controller: $669. I am sure there are dozens of other solutions – Gecko drivers, Chinese specials, etc. My goal was to get it up and running quickly.

The box from Keling had everything I needed prewired and ready to flip the switch. It also has an emergency stop switch on the front all wired too. I also picked up a license for Mach3 from Keling, though you can get it directly from Artsoft if you want. With Mach3 loaded on a desktop PC, a parallel cable connected between the PC and the Keling box, that part of the process was done. Note that many of the members here make their own boxes and control panels. I may do that at some point as well, but I wanted to make sawdust quickly!

The next part was more frustrating – wiring the stepper motors to the Keling box. You can read volumes on the web (and on this forum) about stepper motor wiring. But in the end it comes down to just 4 wires in two pairs between each of the motors on your machine and the Keling box. The catch is that each motor (in my case) had 8 wires. Sadly, the machine was so old that there was no wiring diagram for the motors. This will be your first major challenge in the upgrade. If you search something like “determine stepper motor wiring” in Google, you’ll get step by step instruction on how to figure out which wires go to which coils. For me… I cheated. I located a stepper motor on eBay (Superior Electric M091-FD-6202B) that matched the ones on my machine and bought it (~$20). It came with the wiring diagram. Problem solved. And I’ll put the extra stepper motor to use when I construct a rotary axis for the machine this Winter.

After determining the wiring, I purchased 30’ of 4-conductor shielded cable. (10’ for each axis), 4-pin molex connector pairs, a whole bunch of pins for the connectors, and a crimping tool for the pins. Do yourself a favor and get the crimping tool. It’s inexpensive and makes the job of putting the pins on the wires quick and easy. All this stuff can be purchased on eBay from vendors like HUBBARD CNC. Just search for them.

After the cables were made, I cut the cables on the machine at the controller box. It didn’t make sense in my case to rewire the whole machine. Some of the runs are lengthy and run through cable tracks. It was easier to cut the cables at the old controller box and put a molex on the old wires to mate with the cables I had just made to run to the new controller box. The RM25 is a smaller machine, so you’ll have to determine how you want to do the wiring between the steppers and the keling box.

Okay. Mach3 loaded, computer on, parallel cable hooked up, keling box on, and cables to the steppers connected. At this point you should be able to use the Mach3 configuration file from Keling to load into Mach3 and get some movement off your steppers.

Of course, this is where the real learning starts. As shipped, the CAMTech RMII does not have limit switches (switches that indicate when a given axis is at the limits of its travel) on the X or Y axis. The Z-axis does have a “home switch” on my machine and I worked with that. I purchased four lever micro-switches and mounted these at each end of the axis. The wires for each switch were wired in series using the normally closed position. This lets me have only two wires on four switches to hook up to the keling box “limit switch” connector.

My advice, DO NOT OPERATE YOUR MACHINE WITHOUT LIMIT SWITCHES! First off, the limit switches make it easy to “home” your machine. That is get it to a known repeatable position. The second reason is that as you begin to learn about tool offsets and fixture offsets and various other offsets in Mach3, you can easily make a mistake and run the machine into the end of an axis.

Properly wired limit switches prevent the machine from tearing itself apart when you make a mistake. I had one close call at the end of an axis while I was wiring up the limit switches, and after that, lots of times I tripped them, but with no damage to the machine. Again, that is what they are there for!
So start by gathering all the parts together – the keeling box, cables, connectors, etc. While your waiting for them to be delivered, figure out your motor wiring. Let me know how this goes and I’ll post more as we go along.

Have fun

-David

[getrolfed]

Hi, I have a Routermaster 52 that I would like to "upgrade". I have been getting so many different stories about what to do from different sources including AXYZ. I just want to make sure I don't spend a bunch of $$$ on electronics that are not right for the job.

Right now I have 2 working Camtech controllers and 2 pendant boxes. Since the unit has only about 3 inches of z-axis travel, I would like to replace the z-axis with a 6 or 8 inch ball screw and lower the table.

I am considering a Keling setup :

A: KL-5056-48 4 Axis CNC Stepper Motor Driver Controller: $729

Brand New 4 Axis Controller for NEMA23 and 34 Stepper motors

Ready to plug and use , Tested With Mach3

1: 4 PCS KL-5056 Bipolar Drivers, 50V, 5.6A, DIP
switch current setting, Automatic Idle-Current Reduction
Over-Current, Over-Voltage & Short-Circuit Protection

2: 1 PCS 48V/12.5A power Supply, 115V/230V

3: 1 PC Breakout Board for 6 axis, Isolated signal .

4: With E-Stop, x, y, z limit Switch, Home Switch

5: 1 PCS Fan

... and yet, I'm not convinced that I know enough about what I am doing to just go and buy all this equipment and get it to work.

Any suggestions???

[cabnet636]

i went with the larger powersupply, i do a lot of 3d and all three axis working at full cap at the same time can cause step loss with out enouh power. keling is good stuff used plenty of it on three machines, i have the 1200 oz motors on x/y and the 960 on the z

[getrolfed]

So, are you suggesting that the Keling 5052-48 would work on the Routermaster 52 for a 3D carving setup?

The Camtech (AXYZ) rep that I spoke with said that I could not upgrade my machine without replacing all the stepper motors. He said they would not work with the newer controllers. My motors are 2 phase Vexta.

[cabnet636]

what model numbers are the vextras

[getrolfed]

The stepper motors are
VEXTA PH296L-01
2 phase
1.7 Volt
4.7 Amp

The controller is a CamTech
RMMXZ51ABCTCMJEO
serial# 1389-9508

I am considering dropping the table 4" to add some Z travel and replacing the Z actuator and motor. I see a sturdy looking unit on eBay with 8" of Z travel using a Nema 23 or 34 stepper.

[cabnet636]

sorry i ended up on the honeydo list, will take a look in the am for the wiring, i think you are ok!