where is the loop closed?

[Boltz]

Hi, I'm considering buying a 1998 vintage 3 axis Motion Master which has a Fagor 8050 controller.

I'm not familiar with these controls and I'm wondering whether the "smarts" resides: in the drives or in the controller. In other words, is the loop closed between the motor encoder and the drive, or does the controller read the encoders?

Is the trajectory generation on par with something like Softservo or EMC?

Does this control support arcs on all three planes?

Has the 8050 reached "legacy" status? Would an upgrade to an 8055 provide useful additional speed for a mix of 2.5D and 3D operations?

-Jim Hart

[Al_The_Man]

In my experience, typically Fagor control of servo's has always been with the controller.
I would think the 8050 is above the Softservo or EMC, Dynomotion with Kflop/Kanalog may be equivalent or faster?.
I suspect that the 8050 has reached legacy status, as it is almost 20yrs old.
The 8055 is a nice control, however.
Al.

[Boltz]

mactec54 has a Softservo setup with fiber optic cabling and he loves it. In a thread a while back on HSM with Haas machines he said Softservo's lookahead capabilities were far superior.

EMC in low end applications driving steppers is limited by the latency of the parallel port, but when used with servos and a compatible fpga interface (like the ones from Mesa) reportedly delivers fairly high end performance, closing the loop at the PC level. Examples are hard to find, though.

Both have realtime kernels.

Still, in it's day, the Motion Master was state of the art, and if the Fagor 8050 can be kept operational, it might be all I really need.

Could the machine specific stuff like homing routines and the g-code interpreter be easily moved over to an 8055?

-Jim Hart