How about that?

[Zig]

I am running with tek 6 servo drivers and Anaheim Automation BLWR235D BLDC motors.
The setup was put together ( finaly) in January of this year ( 2008).

It worked and behaved extremely well.

On 5 micron resolution sensor cutting diagonal lines ( with a v groove tool) we could observe a peak to peak ripple of about 2.5 micron measured with a microscope with a graticule.

A very happy combination.

About a month ago I decided to replace the humble spiral cut wire loom conduit with a drag chain.
Not a happy decision on a couple of fronts.

Initially the supplier of drag chain supplied only half the number of links and end clips and then on a weekly delivery schedule from his manufacturer delivered the remaining portion of the drag chain five weeks later.

Now comes the sad part.

The wiring harness was repackaged into the drag chain, machine reassembled and fired up.

The usual please press the reset button to get the system to run took place and... it did not want to play.

Impatiently I kicked it in the guts ( pressed reset button ) a few times in quick succession and lo and behold one of servo amps released a nasty brown smell and a quantity of smoke.

I doubled over ( machine had just returned the abdominal favour).

It was late of the evening, no chance of chewing on cncteknix ear.

The following morning I spoke to Pete at cncteknix. It was a nice cry session.
Anyway I ordered a new servo driver plus a spare.

During the course of the day I spent some time investigating reasons for the unusual failure.

The track carrying the main load supply ( from +24V connector pin had fused). I figured... an arm of the bridge went tits up.WHY?

It turns out that the motor windings became shorted to the motor case.
Further investigation revealed I had not ( on this particular motor ) included a washer beneath the mounting screw head. This in turn allowed the screw to penetrate too deep into motor cavity, cut through a thin FR4 shim and contact the coil windings. May be taking the motor off and replacing it once too often did the trick.

Anyway the motor was reassembled, returned to its rightful spot plus washers ( what did the nut say to the bolt?... NO NO NOT WITHOUT A WASHER).

No shorts to ground.
Next step to test Pete's what seemed like an off the cuff comment: "... may be the bridge is not damaged, its good for 45amps peak...".

The burned out track was repaired and lo ad behold the machine would reset.. the motor and the axis worked and the machine is back...running.

How do I tell Pete I don't need the two servo amps?

Please help.

Nah just kidding. What I wanted to say was .. a great servo amp Pete..

Thanks.

[veteq]

Hey Zig,

That are some nice drives you got there, still happy with it.
Are they easy to set up and tune?

Been thinking to buy a view off them, what do you think, will they work with the nema17 bldc`s from anaheim?

Why arent there more people using them???

They are out off stock till July, are there a lot off users in austria.
What kind off machine do you use them for?
Tell me more about them.

Regards,

Roy B.

[Zig]

Hello Roy,

Yes still running the same gear, very happy with the drivers although I wish they were rated at a somewhat higher voltage ( say 36 volts as opposed to 24 V).

In fact they are running off two car batteries with a 24V charger topping them up as need be. I have had to put a single diode in the charging path in order to reduce the battery terminal to about 27 volts ( I am pushing the drivers here a bit). Driver output stage id notionaly good for 28 volts but one of the cards starts to misbehave at the 28V mark.

If You can get 24V motors from Anaheim that would be great as that way the motors and driver will be matched somewhat better than in my setup.

Tek 6 have gone through the redisign since I purchased mine; initially the power devices were ocated on the top side of the printed circuit board with heat sinks attached from the top.
The redesigned units had their power devices moved to the bottom side so as to be able to take advantage of the chasis in lieu of a heat sink.a better proposition I think.

Additionally the incoder inputs were made via an RG11 connector. A bit impractical uless one had apropriate lengths of CAT cable terminated in RG11 plugs. That has been augmented with a inline header option so when ordering make sure you tell them which kind of encoder input You need.

Another little problem... If You are going to rely on the +5 V from the header to drive your encoder be aware that the 5 volts is not quite 5Volts . There is a diode between 5V regulator which supplies the controller and the 5 Volt pin on the encoder input connector. If your encoder needs at least 5 volts to work correctly , take the 5Volts from the regulator. I had that problem with enishaw linear scale reader head.. it prefers a solid 5 volt supply ( 5.3 V).

Thats about all I can say. Ah one more thing... You may need one PC to run your CNC control software and another PC to effect tuning of the driver.
The PC which provides tuning needs to have a serial port.
This may have changed as the newest generation of tek6 product may now communicate via ethernet port. Please confirm with CNCTeknix current status.

Good luck