FrankenRouter

[Garyhlucas]

I am a Mentor for Team Mercury 1089 in Hightstown NJ. I am 71 and still work full time designing and building automation machines.

So after five years of interruptions our FrankenRouter built from the Carcasses of machines I built 30 years is finally up and running! It is a 24x28x6 router with a full enclosure that is on wheels and fits through a 35" wide school door. It has a coolant pan and pump to provide coolant for cutting metals. The front and back doors can be raised 1" to allow a full sheet of plywood to pass through. The front door is counterbalances and electrically raised and lowered.

The control cabinet, power transformer for 68vac, vacuum, coolant pan all came from a junkyard! The table is insulated from the frame so we can set up a touch probe. We also are already installing a 4th axis using a mini-lathe spindle and a large stepper motor and high voltage drive so it can also be used as a lathe. The spindle currently is a Hitachi Router, which I have used on my own machine for 11 years.


Now the questions. The spindle currently can't run with any door open. But I would like to add an input to the Acorn to force a very slow jog speed if the door is open. It already has switches for this. I want the students to be able to rapid over to a part then open open the door and only allow very slow motion as they touch off the part. How do I do this?

If I load the Acorn lathe program will I be able to drive the 4th axis stepper motor as a continuous spindle motor and maybe even get position feedback without an encoder since it is step and direction?

[suntravel]

Spindle in Acorn is only 0-10V The stepper will only do its thing as a spindle if you build a circuit generating step signals from 0-10V

Safety door logic is in the PLC, there you can do anything you want.

Uwe

[Garyhlucas]

I found the door safety routine I was looking for. Very nice and simple to implement. A bit of a bummer for using the 4th axis as a spindle. The old PLC with a new CPU can’t do highspeed pulse train. In my home CNC I’m converting to Acorn I have a PLC with analog inputs and highspeed outputs so piece of cake to spin the 4th as a spindle.

I am struggling with setting tool Z. In Mach 3 I have a Tool Offset button set for 1/2” pin. Touch the pin and press the offset button and Mach 3 knows the tool is 1/2” above the part. How can I do this in Acorn? I can’t find where I would enter that 1/2” and use it.

[cnckeith]

erector set router! ha.

fyi. step and direction output for continuous 4th axis stepper motor to act as another spindle for 4th axis lathe like operations is on the to do list.

[Garyhlucas]

I get why it doesn't work that way, was hoping it didn't. On my machine I have a separate motion PLC (AD BRX) with 3 axis of motion control built in and up to 250Khz. Also has 8 250Kz digital inputs too for reading up to 3 encoders, and 4 analog inputs. I just added a 4 pole relay to switch the 4th axis drive from the Acorn to the PLC and get the speed from the 0-10vdc out of the Acorn to the PLC. Easy Peasy.