Hi so I have an old gmf p-150 robot I'm trying to retrofit. Most of the RF controller works but the CPU board has crapped out...I'm trying to use the old vcus before I get all new drives the command pin-out is as follows 1 and 14 position control ready, 2and 15 enable, 3 and 16 overheat,4 and 17 velocity control ready, 7 and 20 velocity commands for both axes , 8,9,10,11 are alarms and 13 is common. Any ideas? The vcus are a06b- 6050-h202 the test point for velocity command is 0.687 x velocity command voltage
It is probably doable, at least the 6050 series drives are analog AC. They are good drives and good motors. The parts are cheap. the velocity commands are +/- 10 VDC I believe. I don't know about the encoders on robots though. If they are absolute encoders you may have a hard road ahead. Most of the motors will have brakes and I think those are 90V DC
You probably don't want to hear this, but I've been lurking on quite a few forums for a long time, and with a few exceptions, 90% of the time people try to piece meal some kind of home brew controller to replace an older Fanuc system, the machine ends up going to the scrap yard, ad that is just for 2 and three axis machines. More Axis, more headaches. For robot parts that old, they should be readily available and cheap on ebay. Try to replace the CPU and get the old control working, It shouldn't cost much, you will learn a lot and by then you may know enough to try to emulate the control signals you will need. Those old engineers were a lot smarter than many give them credit for and smarter than I will ever be.
P.S. You are not the first to try this kind of thing.
Here is a post on this fourm of a guy that tried 10 years ago. https://www.cnczone.com/forums/fanuc/7984-posts.html
You might try to contact him and see if he has any advice other than "Dont" LOL
Thanks very much for you alls input....Ive decided my best option in further thinking is the stmbl open source servo drive ....I've heard the retrofit horror stories and I'm still determined to give it a shot.
My advice would be to only buy one of those drives and try to run the motor with the motor still in the robot. I looked that thing and I think it would probably run your motor on the bench, but under load, especially rapidly reversing directions would vaporize that thing. No offense but it looks like a toy. Take a look inside that fanuc drive and take a look at the size of the capacitors, and the size Transistor modules/ IGBTs, braking resistors, and the mass of the heat sink. They are that big for a reason. May as well use them as you have them already and are matched and tuned to your motors in their current application. Just tuning a single servo can be a daunting task in itself. There are drives that will try to tune themselves, but I've yet to find one that really does a good job. You will need to keep those big transformers regardless. They are what provide the voltage for the servo motors. Either way you go, if you want to use a homebrew control to run it you are going to have to find a way to deal with the encoder feed back, either by converting the fanuc encoder output to something you can use, or by replacing the encoders. Centroid offers kits to retrofit their encoders to fanuc motors. They are a little crude on the install though. Are you familiar with the CNCcookbook site. There are quite a few people out there messing about with similar things to what you want to do. Where are you located by the way. I'm near Eau Claire, Wi and might be of some assistance if you were close.
I'm on a somewhat arallel path to you, in trying to make these old Fanucs work. there is some overlap. I hope you are successful. No matter what you will learn a great deal and it is time well spent if for no other reason.
This has actually been a question for me for about a year....now that I have that valuable piece of Intel that they are most likely +/- 10 analog I might be able to get em to do their thing that being said the pin-out does not list a signal common only an alarm common which is slightly perplexing. Yes the stmbls look tiny and insignificant that being said they are good to 2.2 kw and have been used with quite a bit of success in cnc but some in robots. The largest servos the p-150 has are about 1.5 kw ( I also have a p-155, and two yaskawa UP6). I'm pretty sure the old vcus use straight power transistors as igbts were not yet common in 86, so perhaps the igbts and their robustness will have an easier time, I'll go both routes but I'm fairly sure I'm over trying to get the systems brain to agree with me. Unfortunately I live in Texas Regina lol. So forum banter is the best we can do to help each other. I love old GMF robots I wish I could find more but I fear most met their end in a compactor long ago . ( but if you ever find a gmf s series model 0 let me know I want that robot bad). I'll check out cnc cookbook
Using old gmf vcus with arduino
Reply with Quote
. ( but if you ever find a gmf s series model 0 let me know I want that robot bad). I'll check out cnc cookbook
