SERVO QUESTION

[KenjiGuitars]

Greetings everyone..

Need your opinions on this.
Planning on building a new CNC router this coming summer and have a chance to get my hands on a cheap set of servo driver combo.

This is a Mitsubishi Servo Motor model HC-PQ23 and Servo Driver model MR-C20A.

I currently use Mach3. Wondering if I can use mach3 for this and what BOB or controller board do I need? Will the typical 6 axis parallel port board work or do I need a USB board for this?
I need a 5-6 axis...

Thanks and await your replies!




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[RCaffin]

The specs I have found say that the driver takes a pulse train input and the motor has an encoder feedback.
That is enough to say with reasonable confidence that Mach3 and Mach4 can drive it.
While you *could* drive this from the LPT port on an old computer, my advice would be to also buy an external pulse engine like the Ethernet Smooth Stepper and a couple (2x) BreakOutBoards.
The combination would be good.

Cheers
Roger

[KenjiGuitars]

Roger,

Thanks for the reply.

As a follow up to your answers:

1. If I choose to drive this via LPT (I currently use one for my current set up) would it work with just servo motor + servo driver + BOB setup? (typical stepper/driver/bob setup)
2. Why do I need a smoothstepper? would a UC100 do the same function? Or perhaps a USB Mach3 board would suffice?
(I assumed I need a usb connection as opposed to running via LPT...)
3. Why 2 breakout boards?

Regards,

Kenji

[RCaffin]

Hi Kenji

1) LPT to BoB to servo driver to motor will work fine. Original Mach3.

2) You don't HAVE to have an ESS, but these days finding a genuine LPT (on a new box) is very hard. Also, one LPT port runs out of signal pins quickly.

3) The ESS actually offers THREE parallel ports rather than just one. Many only use two of them, so two BoBs.

Now, ESS/UC100/other thing
The USB interface is extremely susceptible to electrical noise. It's great for keyboards and cameras, but for kilowatt machines ... not good. You keep getting USB comms failures. The UC100 is better at handling the noise problem than the old USB Smooth Stepper, but that company (UC) is also transitioning to the ethernet. The ethernet has much larger signals and they are isolated from the PC; the USB has small signals and they are not isolated. Basically, go ethernet.

I am not sure what you mean by 'USB Mach3 board', but I will assume it is a Chinese thing. We have had bad experiences with them: they don't handle all Mach3 commands and usually come with pirate copies of Mach3 - sometimes with a virus. This community will not support dodgy Chinese boards, the vendors don't support them either, and we will NOT support pirate copies of Mach3.

Cheers
Roger

[RCaffin]

Hi Kenji

1) LPT to BoB to servo driver to motor will work fine. Original Mach3.

2) You don't HAVE to have an ESS, but these days finding a genuine LPT (on a new box) is very hard. Also, one LPT port runs out of signal pins quickly.

3) The ESS actually offers THREE parallel ports rather than just one. Many only use two of them, so two BoBs.

Now, ESS/UC100/other thing
The USB interface is extremely susceptible to electrical noise. It's great for keyboards and cameras, but for kilowatt machines ... not good. You keep getting USB comms failures. The UC100 is better at handling the noise problem than the old USB Smooth Stepper, but that company (UC) is also transitioning to the ethernet. The ethernet has much larger signals and they are isolated from the PC; the USB has small signals and they are not isolated. Basically, go ethernet.

I am not sure what you mean by 'USB Mach3 board', but I will assume it is a Chinese thing. We have had bad experiences with them: they don't handle all Mach3 commands and usually come with pirate copies of Mach3 - sometimes with a virus. This community will not (can not) support dodgy Chinese boards, the vendors don't support them either, and we will NOT support pirate copies of Mach3.

Cheers
Roger

[ger21]

For servos, you'd usually want/need much higher pulse rates thaan you can get from a parallel port, which maxes out @ 60-75khz.
I wouldn't recommend a UC100, because it's not much faster, at 100khz.
I'd recommend a UC300eth or UC400eth, which can go to 400khz. They also give you the option of using UCCNC, which imo is much better than Mach3.

The ESS can go to 4Mhz, but few drives can utilize such high pulse rates.

I highly recommend avoiding asll Chinese Mach3 motion controllers.