Continued from post above......
Operator panel, and computer removed
An empty computer cabinet. New board mounting plate installed on the door. Needed parts ordered today, they should be here Friday if everything goes well.
Had to do a little surgery on the new computer case, was just a bit big to fit the way we wanted.
And the new computer. Only took about 6 hours to update Windows, and load the software. Not shown in this picture are the 2 installed Galil cards. Galil cards, plural because I only had 4 and 1 axis cards on hand, so to drive 5 axes, I need to install 2 Galil cards. I've done this before so I know it works. I only need coordinated motion for 3 axes, so I can get away with an orphan card.
Still have a few cables hanging out of the electrical cabinet, I'll remove the unneeded ones when I get it all figured out.
As it turns out, it seems that the motor encoders do not connect to the servo drives, they went straight to the computer. This is a good thing, that means they will connect directly to the Galil card which is my prefered method. What I can't exactly figure out is how the servos are commutated without any feedback, must be using some type of sensorless vector control. The input the Fanuc drives is just a normal +/- 10V analog command signal. I hope the spindle servo drive plays nice, it has an ''orient'' feature driven from a separate spindle encoder, I'm hoping I can figure out how to disable that or at least get the drive to ignore it.
Some of the parts came in today, and I should get the rest tomorrow (Friday). So I expect by Monday we'll have the wheels turning, and after a little software debug we'll be making chips by Wednesday.
The new software is coming along, I'll post a screenshot in a few days.
More later........
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