Mach3, Allen Bradley Ultra-100 (1398-DDM-005), Y-1002-1 Motor

[LantonioA]

I connected an Old PC 1.2GHz running Mach3 to a Breakout Board (Attached), then the board to an Allen Bradley Ultra-100 (1398-DDM-005) Servo Drive, that is connected to an Allen Bradley Y-1002-1 Servo Motor (Incremental 2000 lines/revolution encoder).

The board only has Step+ / Dir+ and Com per axis. However the Drive J1 plug has the following pin-out for the Auxiliary Encoder:
pin 14 (AX+/CW+/STEP+) = Auxiliary Encoder Channel A+
pin 15 (AX-/CW-/STEP-) = Auxiliary Encoder Channel A-
pin 16 (BX+/CCW+/DIR+) = Auxiliary Encoder Channel B+
pin 17 (BX-/CCW-/DIR-) = Auxiliary Encoder Channel B-
pin 18 (IX+) = Auxiliary Encoder Channel I+
pin 19 (IX-) = Auxiliary Encoder Channel I-

So I connected the Board's Step+ to pin 14 and Dir+ to pin 16, and using Ultra-Master I connected to the Drive using its serial port and setup the Operation Mode to be: Follower: Step and Direction. After setting the velocity at maximum on Mach3, I only got 270 RPM although the motor is 4500 RPM rated. I've got 4320 RPM by going into the Drive Parameter on the Follower tab and gearing it to 16:1. Of course, 16 x 270 is 4320! I don't think is right to gear a motor that much...

Now the questions:
1 - Is the PC or Mach3 not fast enough to send those pulses? It's only 01 axis trial...
2 - Does the motor encoder has too much resolution for the program?
3 - Or is the Board I've got so cheap and it does not have Step- and Dir-?
4 - How important is Step- Dir- IX+ IX-? And what are they for?
5 - What types of pulses do the PLCs and controllers send to the Drive on the industry?
6 - If I do need a much better Motion Control card with Step+- and Dir+-, does anybody know a good source with a fair price?

Allen Bradley calls the connection I've made "External Step/Direction Interface via Single-Ended TTL Line Drivers (not recommended)".
What I would like to do is: "External Step/Direction Interface via TTL Differential Line Drivers (recommended)", but for that the controller must have Step- and Dir-.

Any help will be appreciated!
Luiz

[ger21]

Mach3's default kernel speed is 25Khz, or 25000 steps/second. You can try setting it higher, but your PC is on the slow side. 35Khz might work, though.

If you need higher speeds, you can use an external pulse generator, like a Smoothstepper, that can do 4Mhz.

[LantonioA]

Yes gear21, I want to get the motor maximum rated speed, because I will use at least a 10:1 ball reducer for the axes. I already had set the kernel to 35KHz.

I forgot to mention that whenever I move the mouse fast or if the main busy Mach3's screen is showing, I feel a very few "glitches or unsmoothness" at top speed when holding the motor by hand.

I like your idea of the SmoothStepper and I want to read about it, but I want to try my regular PC first which is much much faster. By the way, another detail I've forgotten to mention is that my breakout board uses a parallel port. How fast is a parallel port? Depending on their speed, it won't do any good to use my faster PC...

Thanks,
Luiz

[ger21]

How fast is a parallel port? Depending on their speed, it won't do any good to use my faster PC...

As far as Mach3 is concerned, as fast as the processor will let it be. Some PC's can use 100Khz mode, but for most, 75Khz is the maximum. The parallel port is not the issue.