Bridgeport Interact 4 Series 2 to Acorn6 build

[richardb15]

I have a pet hate of bare wires being twisted and poked into terminal blocks as sometimes you get those little wire whiskers that cause spurious faults that are very difficult to trace, or if you take them in and out a few times the wire ends up mashed up. I like to use bootlace or fork ferrules to prevent both those issues. Yes it takes a bit longer on the build, but its a more robust job. So more shopping arrived:



This is fork and bootlace crimp ferrules, a bootlace crimp tool, self adhesive coloured wire marker labels (720 in various colours), 30 meters of screened encoder cable for the servo motors and Acorn to drive wiring, adhesive lined heat shrink to finish encoder wiring so the screen ends are not exposed to stuff they shouldn't be, and a decent Klein wire cutter/stripper as I seen to have lost my old one! All the bits and pieces came from Amazon or Ali Express with the exception of encoder cable, that was from Element14.

Next job, unzip CNC12, configure PC, drink more tea and get stuff out on the bench to start wiring tomorrow. Exciting stuff!

[richardb15]

I would suggest reaching out to the manufacturer directly https://www.chrh.group/support

Pretty uncommon drive.

I managed to get hold of CHRH via their Whatsapp chat while I was away travelling. So the VF drive is what they call a G series, and they say they don't have any documentation available for this as its legacy. I find it hard to believe they don't have an archive, or even someone on the staff who worked on that product, but anyway the response is negative, can't help. They sent me the F series install and operation manual but at 335 pages I haven't managed to bring myself to get into that yet. To perhaps help someone else in the future and get this searchable, here is the CHRH F series manual:



Next step on this VFD is just to bench wire it and see what happens, I've nothing to lose. I'll just wire it up to a voltage divider and see if I can get it to run, then I can run through the parameters and just change them randomly and see what happens if its not already factory configured to work.

[Chaz]

Nice machine. Ive done an Interact 1 or 2 some years ago. I might have missed it, why did you go for Acorn 6 versus the normal 4 axis board? Encoder feedback?

[richardb15]

Nice machine. Ive done an Interact 1 or 2 some years ago. I might have missed it, why did you go for Acorn 6 versus the normal 4 axis board? Encoder feedback?

The machine has suffered from serious neglect and poor storage in the past, I hope it will be a nice machine when sorted but its not the prettiest thing right now! I'm using an Acorn6 because my main reason for fixing this machine is to machine cylinder castings for veteran cars and motorcycles. These are usually blind barrels, side valve and with threaded inlet and exhaust ports at funny angles. The company who used to do the thread milling for me on their CNC's has got too big and now won't take on small batch fiddly jobs like these. They've forgotten the customers who got them where they are now, but thats another story. So I need to cut all sorts of diameter and pitch threads at various angles so it not financially practical to buy taps and dies, hence thread milling. I need at least a 4th axis to reduce my fixturing, and I need a 5th to allow me to motorise the knee. The quill only has 5" travel and to bore the blind barrels I need up to 12" travel to give a second Z axis just for boring ops. The knee will be used for that extra travel option. It's also much nicer to have a motorised knee to prevent all that handle winding for setups Might as well being as I have the motors, drives and I-O with the Acorn. The 6 also comes with the two relay boards already setup so a bit easier and tidier for install being this is my first Acorn attempt. Sorry for the long answer but I hope that explains the reasoning behind what may seem a bit over the top.

[richardb15]

More progress today as I wired up the basic setup for the Acorn6 ready to bench test. Just the Acorn power supply, a single e-stop button, the spindle encoder and an X axis motor/drive. This allowed me to get comms and software working, check board function and sort out some basic drive and Acorn parameters to get things moving, check enable and alarm to-from the Acorn and drive etc. It was pretty easy and intuitive to do even though the drives I'm using are not on the pre configured lists. I know the steps/rev etc and drive movement calibrations are wrong but this was just to get movement from one of the HBS2206 drives.


Drive job check OK


Spindle encoder working

Next job is to get the H2-2206 drive basic config sorted and after that rip the rest of the unwanted old wiring and relays out of the machine so I can install the drives, motors and Acorn6 in the knowledge I should get movement to enable limits and steps/rev and mm/rev etc config.

[Chaz]

Nice machine. Ive done an Interact 1 or 2 some years ago. I might have missed it, why did you go for Acorn 6 versus the normal 4 axis board? Encoder feedback?

The machine has suffered from serious neglect and poor storage in the past, I hope it will be a nice machine when sorted but its not the prettiest thing right now! I'm using an Acorn6 because my main reason for fixing this machine is to machine cylinder castings for veteran cars and motorcycles. These are usually blind barrels, side valve and with threaded inlet and exhaust ports at funny angles. The company who used to do the thread milling for me on their CNC's has got too big and now won't take on small batch fiddly jobs like these. They've forgotten the customers who got them where they are now, but thats another story. So I need to cut all sorts of diameter and pitch threads at various angles so it not financially practical to buy taps and dies, hence thread milling. I need at least a 4th axis to reduce my fixturing, and I need a 5th to allow me to motorise the knee. The quill only has 5" travel and to bore the blind barrels I need up to 12" travel to give a second Z axis just for boring ops. The knee will be used for that extra travel option. It's also much nicer to have a motorised knee to prevent all that handle winding for setups Might as well being as I have the motors, drives and I-O with the Acorn. The 6 also comes with the two relay boards already setup so a bit easier and tidier for install being this is my first Acorn attempt. Sorry for the long answer but I hope that explains the reasoning behind what may seem a bit over the top.

Not at all, glad I asked.

Ive got a 5 Axis machine, currently running UCCNC. Its a Gate which is a Bridgeport clone. Never considered the knee as motorised (well, not via control other than a simple up / down option). How would you control it, ie, what axis would it be?

[richardb15]

Not at all, glad I asked.

Ive got a 5 Axis machine, currently running UCCNC. Its a Gate which is a Bridgeport clone. Never considered the knee as motorised (well, not via control other than a simple up / down option). How would you control it, ie, what axis would it be?

I'll probably config the knee as axis6 and a linear. It would only be used for deep boring ops so even if I can't used canned cycles or CAM it is only a few lines of G&M code to hand write. I need to get the machine lube pump wired up then run it and measure the torque required to turn the knee handle. That will determine the belt ratio I have to use, or even if I need to sort out a counterweight or air cylinder assist as its a heavy lump of iron to lift!

[Chaz]

Thanks, so just another Axis (clearly cant duplicate Z) and find a way to edit PP / CAM to use?

[richardb15]

Thats the plan A. If that won't work, and I can't see why not, I'll just run a new config of the software to use the knee as Z rather than the quill when I need to do deep boring jobs. I don't think that will be required though as in effect the Acorn / CNC12 will only do what the G&M code says so if the code says move axis ZZ at feed/rev then thats what it will do.

[suntravel]

I would label the knee W axis. With a little customizing it should work well.

Uwe