Need Help!- Advise needed - optical encoder AC servos

[scobob]

I recently acquired a Sankyo Cartesian robot that was in fully working condition when it was pulled from production. The system is complete with a highly proprietary Sankyo SC3000 controller and touch screen pendant. The servos on the X and Y are Sankyo H27LK52 267W optical AC servos. The Z is a smaller 110W with electronic brake. I haven't been successful in finding anything to either control the servos or to post process for this controller. I have only a couple options at this point; Pull the servos and the controller and sell them; or sell the robot as a whole and build from scratch. I'd like to keep the servos as they are really beefy and obviously perfect for the machine but do me no good if I can't control them. I don't know what my other options are. Take a look at the photos and let me know what you think. Is it worth putting the money into the servos and controllers or keeping it whole and selling off.

Contacts I've tried already: Geckodrives, BobCAD as they had a post processor for Sankyo but not this machine; Sankyo with no response. Derek at Motomation.com

Looking at possibly replacing the motors with the 7.2Nm 3 axis kit from DMM-Tech.

Any help or advise would be greatly appreciated.

[keebler303]

Do you have pictures of the motors? You can most likely keep the motors and just get new drives and then use something like mach3 to control it. Hard to say what you need without seeing what the motors are and what kind of feedback device they have attached.

Matt

[scobob]

Thanks for the response. The motors are AC brushless 220V with a proprietary optical encoder. Gecko is DC only so they're out and I've looked everywhere I can think of but can't seem to find any drives for them. They have a 4 pin Molex connector for power and a 9 pin controller cable. I don't have any schematics for the wiring and it's nearly impossible to find any information on them. I'll get some picture of the motors and encoders when I get home tonight. I don't know enough about these to know if the encoder can be replaced and used with a different drive. If it sounds like I don't know what I'm talking about, there's a good reason.

[Al_The_Man]

Normally a differential encoder would be 2- power, 6 - encoder, 3 - commutation plus shield.
Unless they use an initial sync pulse and then use the differential for commutation.
Al.

[mactec54]

scobob

You will have to go with the drives,that the motor/encoders are suited to, 220v seems high most of these types are 100V, 200V, 400V, That may be there max voltage & they would be fine on a 200V drive

If you are going to use your machine for cutting, you will need bigger motors than the 267watts,Just looking at the high pitch ballscrews, they look like they are about 25mm pitch, which will be 1 turn of the screw will move the slide 25mm, most likely the 267w will be ok for the Z axes,110w on the Z axes is way to small

But if you are going with DMM system then you won't need to bother with these motors

[scobob]

Originally Posted by mactec54 scobob You will have to go with the drives,that the motor/encoders are suited to, 220v seems high most of these types are 100V, 200V, 400V, That may be there max voltage & they would be fine on a 200V drive If you are going to use your machine for cutting, you will need bigger motors than the 267watts,Just looking at the high pitch ballscrews, they look like they are about 25mm pitch, which will be 1 turn of the screw will move the slide 25mm, most likely the 267w will be ok for the Z axes,110w on the Z axes is way to small But if you are going with DMM system then you won't need to bother with these motors

Thanks, that's the direction I am going. I've emailed Hui at DMM-Tech and hopefully he can set me up with a deal on (2) 900W and (1) 250 or 400W for the Z.

Thanks again for your help.

[scobob]

Here are some pics of the servos. Don't know if will help. My engineering friend that did the design work on the robot says they are absolute encoders.

Hui, from dmm-tech.com informed me that he is 2 weeks away from producing a 300W servo so I am going to check that out for the Z.