When good enough should be good enough
Posted: Tue Jan 14, 2020 10:23 am
About a week ago, I stripped down my test-bench Acorn system, which included removing the CLICK PLC and 1616 Expansion Board from the test setup. (The 1616 expansion board will be used with another Acorn in the near future. The PLC may be retired from use with the Acorn if I find other worthwhile uses for the PLCs.) I rewired a basic system with just a rev4 Acorn, three ClearPath servos, 75VDC toroidal power supply for the servos, a Teknic Power Hub, a 4A 24VDC power supply for the Acorn and the associated circuit breakers, contactor, terminal blocks and homing proximity sensors.
Without the AutomationDirect PLC to filter the way various signals work, I ended up with a system that almost did what I wanted it to do, but not quite. After Gary Campbell's suggestion, I wired the ClearPath enables to 24VDC GROUND (and routed those signals through the contactor so that the motors are only enabled when the 75VDC power supply is on). That solved the Axis Faults that I had been getting when the Acorn activated the Enable signals.
That make everything work, not as hoped, but as required.
That should have been the end of fiddling around. The system was safe to use. It did everything necessary to run a mill.
Finally this morning I decided that hooking up my 'scope to see why the Acorn's H2-H3 enable signals and the ClearPaths' HLFB signals didn't play nicely together would be a colossal waste of time.
When things work, they work. That should be good enough.
Without the AutomationDirect PLC to filter the way various signals work, I ended up with a system that almost did what I wanted it to do, but not quite. After Gary Campbell's suggestion, I wired the ClearPath enables to 24VDC GROUND (and routed those signals through the contactor so that the motors are only enabled when the 75VDC power supply is on). That solved the Axis Faults that I had been getting when the Acorn activated the Enable signals.
That make everything work, not as hoped, but as required.
That should have been the end of fiddling around. The system was safe to use. It did everything necessary to run a mill.
Finally this morning I decided that hooking up my 'scope to see why the Acorn's H2-H3 enable signals and the ClearPaths' HLFB signals didn't play nicely together would be a colossal waste of time.
When things work, they work. That should be good enough.