Hi Steve Looking good and great news on the VFD front. A mate of mine is trying to sort out his parajust unit at the moment so he may be in touch :) With regard to the index pulse v timing, you may want to consider hooking up the timing pulse for use in closed loop spindle control. The parallel port...

Hi Steve A couple of things - Glad to see you got the system going - great feeling ain't it!!! Right hand side is the stepper motor power supply, rather over the top I think Mr. Denford. (no doubt you had a good deal for them ) rated at 2 x 7.5Amp & 45v ac driving 2 helpless little stepper motors ra...

Hey steve That doesn't sound like normal behaviour - I've never seen that problem with my SD2s. I will try and get some screenshots of my setup for you when I get home tonight. How have you got PC setup? Have you checked that the 'pulse freq' and 'time in int' are good? Are you using a laptop - some...

Have you tried running a simple shuttling program -

E.g
G00 X100
G00 Y50
G00 x0 Y0
G00 X100
G00 Y50
G00 x0 Y0

etc for a few hundred lines?

Hmmm - our Triac at work has started blowing fuses - I say blowing but vapourising would be a better description! The machine powers up ok, but as soon as you turn the drives on the fuse goes

Time to get the meter out.

Good to see that my help came in useful

Yes it's possible - details of my conversion here -

viewtopic.php?t=452&highlight=starturn

Hey bradders

That's my lathe - posted the vid on here a while back.

Cheers

Dave

I don't really want to go down the route of driving the Orac from a PC as I would then have inferior CAM software to the Alphacam I don't get this comment :? I would imagine that your CAM software produces G-code ? Most, if not all the PC driven CNC controllers will open a text file of G-code. I've...

I'm not familiar with that particular machine, but you will want to interpolate an arc in the YZ plane, then an offset in X, YZ Arc, x offset etc. To do this you will need to use a ballnose cutter. The finish will be a series of small ripples - the smaller the X offset the smaller the ripples. If th...

John

Without giving us any technical info (or some details of the drive) we can't really tell you much!

Are your drivers in the Starturn non-working? If not then why replace perfectly good drivers. Replacing the drivers is just as difficult as retrofitting

Cheers

Dave

Everything you need is in the attached PDF from the Cetronic website.

Cheers

Dave

Hi John Well I can't really give you a step by step guide - I just made it up as I went along ! Most of the info I have is on the thread I mentioned but I can try and guide you wherever possible. Try and consider the job as 3 different areas - Stepper motors Switch gear and Estops Spindle Stepper mo...

Yes it's possible, but quite a bit of work - see details of my conversion - viewtopic.php?t=452&highlight=starturn

Cheers

Dave

Have a look at this -

http://www.engr.colostate.edu/~dga/vide ... ration.wmv

Cheers

Dave

Congratulations - are you planning to leave the original controls in or will you rip out the old control board and shove the PC etc under the machine?

Strange :? As I say when I did mine I simply unplugged the step/dir and ground and hooked them in. Sounds like it could be something else. Have you checked the enable lines and the estop. Are there diagnostic LED's on the drivers? If so I take it they are reporting no errors? Is there anything conne...

Hmmm - that sounds like a problem with your wiring / circuit. When I first setup my system, the drivers were connected to the main control board on terminal block, so all I did was unhook 3 wires, step, dir and ground. Can you setup a test board in such a way that you can test each axis at a time wi...

Yup, it will automatically work out the steps per unit (depends on whether the machine has been built in inches or mm's). You can adjust this manually, but shouldn't really need to. Backlash is another issue again. When you set the steps per unit, you need to ensure that you have accounted for the b...

Don't bother trying to work it out ! Go to the settings page, on the left hand side there is a button for set axis steps. Now measure the position of the table to a handy reference point with your verniers. When you click the button it will ask you which axis to move followed by the amount. Enter a ...