Multicam 3000 AcornSix or others

[LogicSpeaks]

Hi all,

I'm new here. I've recently purchased a multicam 3000 CNC router with a rotary tool changer. The CNC uses SST-E545-RCX-4-1-15 servo drives and the motors are M-3422C-LN-16D 16000 Quad/Rev both from teknic inc. The machine appears to be fully functional minus some minor wire shorts I've been working on. It comes with a pendant that works well but I've seemed to have hit a wall in terms of getting some settings I need changed. I need it to all be single phase but VFD Yaskawa 315 GPD V7 7.5 kW is 3 phase and as far as I can tell can only be run at 3 phase. So if I changed to another VFD which I have on hand I would have to change the registers used for RS485 Modbus RTU communication and I don't yet know how to get access to the back-end configuration settings.

Now that we know where I'm beginning I wanted to consider instead to modernizing the machine and switching to a new controller and Centroid has consistently been on my mind. I don't know but it appears that AcornSix might not actually work with my servo drives I listed here? What will I have to go through to get this machine running the Acorn stuff"?

See photos (not great photos but if needed can send better) below and tell me if you need more and thanks in advance!

[Ken Rychlik]

Acorn4 is enough for the task. Hardware pair the long axis or X as it is on multicam. You can do independent squaring with hardware pairing, but it is strong enough that you really don't need to. After doing serveral sst tecknic's I would replace drivers and motors from the start. If you search my post, you can find the wiring pin out for the drivers, should you want to keep using them. Teknic will NOT help with any programming or changes on the drivers and multicam also will not help. If leaves a bad taste in your mouth about teknic, but I hear their clearpath is good. If you want any eclipse teknic motors and drivers, I have some in a drawer. lol

Proxy sensors are backwards from what acorn likes and I replace them.

The vfd you have will run on single phase at about 70% ish of the rated power. Yaskawa has the best customer service tech line, I have ever used, and they will help you make it work if you get to confused by the 500 page manual. They won't tell you it will run on single phase but they will help with the param setting changes needed.

[LogicSpeaks]

Ken this is awesome, thank you for your response.

I'll check out your other posts

In terms of replacing the motors and drives I’m a diy guy who’s day job is to operate a machine at work and I got this Multicam machine very cheaply (6300) so I was trying to avoid in spending tons more and hoped I can just buy one controller (if I was replacing the current multicam board) so if I could just keep my current motors and drives that would be a plus until I could make my money back for this purchase.

In terms of the acorn4 I mainly was considering acorn 6 because I wanted to add a small rotary indexer for doing things like full 3D carving since this router was custom it overhangs significantly on one side so there might be room for this unless the acorn 4 can still accommodate this. I assume it can if I wire servos to the servo connections and then use the stepper connections for the additions like the rotary and the rotary indexer/lathe?
Not sure I follow.


That’s amazing about the VFD - I wasn’t sure how to derate the spindle and happy to see it run it. The tricky aspect to this might be, however is these guys who I bought it from (I assume) replaced the spindle or the drive with a major mismatch. The yaskawa VFD is 7.5kW and the Spindle is a eurospindle 24k rpm is 8 kW. Unless multicam did this? I always understood that the VFD has to be at least one step up more powerful (like 11 kW) for this to be proper or a 5.5kW spindle.


Thanks again

[centroid467]

Acorn4 can do hardware paired axes with autosquaring using a relay and some clever wiring. Hardware pairing in this case refers to wiring two drives to one output port. With this, you can use 5 motors to run 4 axes simultaneously.

The Acorn can only be set up for one type of output at a time: either open collector on the green Phoenix headers or 5V line driver from the DB25. Typically, servo drives work better with the open collectors and stepper drives work better with the DB25.

[LogicSpeaks]

So I have 4 drives that do 3 axis movement, 2 for one axis, 1 for the other, and 1 for z. Then the rotary tool changer is using a stepper driver. Is it not possible to use the stepper connections on the Acorn 4 at the same time? So drive the CNC with the servos and drive the rotary tool changer and rotary indexer (or lathe - whatever people call this) using the stepper connections?


***Correction***I may have answered my own question just now - acorn 4 supports a maximum of 4 drives/motors, its not 4 servo drives + 4 stepper drives - correct?



Unless someone has some pictures or diagrams to wire it the way you mentioned above for autosquaring I might not be advanced enough to do this on my own without help. If my above logic is correct then wouldn't it just be easier to wire each motor to the respective connection on the board

[centroid467]

We have diagrams for this autosquaring configuration that you can find in the Acorn Axis Pairing Guide. I can take a look and see if we have a full sample schematic of that configuration in a little bit.


Ok, so you have 6 drives: 4 servos for XYZ axis motion, a stepper for the rotary axis, and a stepper for the toolchanger. I think you have two options:

Acorn4 with toolchanger handled by some kind of indexing controller and the rotary axis using a stepper drive that works well with whichever output type works best with the servo drives.

AcornSix and you can do software pairing with simplified wiring.


In either case, we do not recommend using both the open collectors and DB25/5V outputs at the same time since the Wizard applies an inversion depending on which type you pick.

[LogicSpeaks]

Thanks for your responses, I'll inspect my tool changer system a bit more and see what it might be - it appeared it was just a stepper driver but I could be wrong.

[cnckeith]

fyi..hardware pairing with relay auto squaring is natively supported in the Acorn Wizard in CNC12 v5.19+ (currently in public beta testing)

(this is in addition to the always supported software pairing with auto squaring feature so now you can easily setup a machine with ether method using the Wizard, and i need to update the axis pairing guide to reflect these new additions to the Wizard.)