Intillegent Actuator IS slides, anyone find an alternate drive?

[jskrebs]

I just bought 4 IAI IS series slides off of Ebay less drives and controller.

The information I can find points towards 60 watt AC servo motors with a quad encoder and no Hall sensors.

I would hate to rip the servos out to use a stepper system.

[jskrebs]

Got the slides in today and pulled the covers off of the motor end. There is a little discrete encoder on the end, the rotor is part of the ball screw and the stator is pressed into the housing. Not an easy motor change out, but I could remove the encoder and couple a nema 17 stepper.

These slides are really nicely made.

Looked at some small 150 watt peak amps from copley, elmo, and some others. They ae smart drives that have indexers and can bus interfaces as well as step and direction imputs. Iinteresting part is they drive AC and DC brushless and stepper motors. Have yet to check the prices hope they are not to steep.

WIll shoot some Pictures and post my progress.

I am building a robot to place magnets in the rotors of some small BLDC outrunner motors I make for the RC airplane hobby industry.

[unterhaus]

I think you are going to have trouble if there are no halls

[jskrebs]

Why do you think the halls are required if they did not have them to begin with?

At my day job I sell lots of AC servo motors that do not have halls.

I can't really count the encoder hashes, but it looks like 1000 line x 4. Think the drive can catch one on powerup?

[Jason Ross]

You could use a Servo Drive with a wake and shake function. SSD Drives has one. It basically will move one electrical cycle so on pwer up be careful that a one cycle move, usually about 5 degrees will not damage anything.

[unterhaus]

sorry I was negative. I meant unless you are really lucky, you probably aren't going to buy the drives for those motors on Ebay. If you have $, there are plenty of options.

I just got a quote for the amc z-drives at around $300 http://www.a-m-c.com/content/prods/d...ro/zintro.html
I don't know if they will do shake and bake but AMC has had drives that will do that.

[jskrebs]

No Problem, but I have found out you are correct. Was looking at the Z drive last night. All the newer small solutions are in the $300 range for small quantities. I am sure OEM pricing is less, but will be tough to get it with my meager 8 drive opportunity.

I also checked with my Motion guy and he said our servos (AB) can catch the 1st encoder pulse, along with some other back EMF mumbo jumbo and don't need halls. Our lowest cost drive list's at around $700 and has a 500 watt rating, way over kill for this application.

Since I will be doing point to point and not contouring I am looking at the smart drives with built in indexing and CAN Bus or device net. One of the drives can be the master and will direct the other drives position and I/O.

[jskrebs]

Here are some photo's of the IAI slides X, Y, and Z. Still need to acquire a Theta.

Also some shots of the encoder end. It is a Quad encoder with a Z axis marker.

[jskrebs]

I also dwloaded the AB TL series servo drive manual and my Motion guy was wrong, there are Halls in there, also an option for a seial absolute encoder