Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

Been wanting a lathe, manual or CNC for a few years. This Techno-Isel CNC Servo Lathe popped up cheap on FB and I jumped on it. It's fully operational and appears to be barely used, but Techno no longer supports it and there are no post-processors to be found. The controller is very limited as it was originally intended for educational use.

So, since I've already done one Acorn/Clearpath conversion on my router and cracked the code, I'll do the same with this lathe.

Here's what is on order:

Acorn Kit w/ Lathe Pro
Clearpath CPM-SDSK-2321S-ELN NEMA 23 98 oz-in continuous
Teknic IPC-5 power supply
EDIT: Intel NUC Micro PC i5-7260U 2.2Ghz

cool, thanks for posting looking forward to the project chronicle.

Clearpath servos mounted, IPC-5 power supply mounted. Made my own control wires for the servos from CAT-6 cable. Each twisted pair is a +/- signal pair. After a lot of frustration on my router, I found these have much better EMF rejection than any other cable I tried, including the expensive ones that Teknic sells.

Nice! thanks for posting.

Be aware that if those wires are going to be seeing movement as the table moves, they need to be flexible. Cat 6 cable may fatigue fairly quickly and fail weeks or months down the road.

True. I did at least use stranded CAT6. The same cable has been working flawlessly in my router for 3 years now. I went through a ton of trial-and-error, time-and-expense to make that machine work, so I'm sticking to the same "formula".

Ready to turn parts. Got all axes running nicely and spindle speed control is working with 0-10V. Homing from limit switches works. Still need to hookup the spindle encoder. The cabinet is a bit of a rat's nest but I'll get that cleaned up once all connections are complete.
I can't see any markings on the existing encoder, does anyone know what the specs might be?

Unkown Encoder:

PID screen, turn spindle one turn, difference in counts is the encoder resolution

Uwe

Good tip Uwe, although I still need to ID the wires. I suspect the green cover is just for dust, and there is a nameplate on the actual encoder underneath. But to access it I'll have to disassemble the entire cabinet. Was hoping to avoid that mess!

The pin outs for the encoders are here...

Hope it helps.