Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

Hi all,

I thought I'd start a build thread for my first foray into Centroid. I guess I should start at the beginning! I'm over in Australia doing this and aftermarket CNC stuff, and general CNC and automation knowledge is scarce, and very expensive if you can find it as distances make getting someone to site often prohibitive.

A friend had this Bridgeport Interact 4 Series 2 which "just had an encoder fault on the spindle", he wasn't of the mind to fix it then learn to use it, so if I wanted it, it was free. The only catch, I had to go and get it. A 2000km round trip later and it was in our shed.



It is pretty rough looking and the top shrouds are missing. Looking at the paperwork, wiring diagrams, had written notes, and state of the cabinets, this machine has a long and chequered history of not working! I've rarely seen such a rats nest of an electrical cabinet, it was not looking good from the get-go.



After many hours I got the Heidenhain 155 to fire up, reset all the parameters, sorted the backup power so it kept parameters, and started working though the issues. Here are the ones I found early on:
1. Backup battery had leaked acid onto motherboard and corroded various tracks, home made battery holder was corroded, and no resistor/diode to prevent back-charging of non rechargeable cells
2. Z axis drive would just run off by itself and hit physical limit switch
3. When Y axis drive was turned by hand it would turn off the PLC
4. X axis drive had a dead short on the DC output, but because it was through an isolation transformer it didn't trip main breakers, just burned out the contactor
5. PLC would not output any voltage signals to drives to home machine
6. Z limit switches were wired incorrectly
7. Y axis optical sine/cosine encoder was not sending signals to the PLC
8. Loads of shorted wires, bad connections and power/signal wires together
9. Two of the numbers on the keypad were not working which makes putting parameters in a bit tricky!

The above basically got me to the point of saying that it was not worth fixing, so time to pull all the Heidenhain and DC drives stuff off. I was hoping to use the existing Contraves spindle drive and motor so made a -10 to +10v adjustable circuit, wired that in, but couldn't get the drive to run. Whilst sat looking into the cabinet thinking, the drive decided it was checking out, starting fizzing and all the smoke got out so that too was dead.



This made the decision even easier. The machine itself is a solid lump, good slides and ball screws, but pretty much anything electrical was stuffed. Time to order an Acorn6 and commit to a build.

Another Interact owner had a faulty machine too so I gave him the TNC155 from my machine and wished him luck. He managed to find that one of the EPROM chips was faulty so that was stopping it homing, along with various bad connections and corrosion. Anyway he managed to build one working TNC from the two, so at least some good came of that. I wasn't sorry to see the back of 40 year old electronics so still happy with the call to retrofit.

My plan for the axes is to use Leadshine H2-2206 and HBS2206S drives as I have a few. They will be driving Leadshine HSM100 and HSM80 motors









I've bench tested the drives and motors using a simple 555 circuit to generate pulses, the HBS2206S work fine fwd, rev and changing speed but the H2-2206 drives, with various similar and different parameters to the HBS seem reluctant to drive. They just hold position or vibrate/oscillate. It may be the non-pure step pulse from my 555 circuit so I'll leave it until I can drive them with the Acorn6. The drives all worked fine on an A-B PLC the last machine I'd used them on. If anyone has known good H2-2206 parameter lists I'd appreciate a copy so I can try them.

For the spindle I'll change to a VFD and asynch motor of 7-10hp. I've been given a CHRH 7.5kW VFD




Only snag with the VFD, it's brand new and unused because the company who bought it a few years ago lost the instructions for wiring and programming/parameters so no idea how to set it up. I've searched online and cannot find anything useful, and CHRH don't reply to live chat or emails via their website. Has anyone got any experience of CHRH VFD's, and hopefully that model, or could share any info to set them up?

I'm going to re-use the existing axis limit and home switches as they all work fine. E-stops are good but 110v so I'll rewire to be LVDC switching. I might keep the jog joysticks for knee automation to do deeper boring ops (5" stroke quill as standard is too short really) so next step is to rip all the old DC stuff out.

The original SEM drives are great heavy lumps, and 4Nm stall torque. The Leadshine servo drives are 8Nm and 12Nm, and 1/3rd of the size so mounting space should not be a problem. As standard all axes are driven via a 1:2 ratio 8M20 belt setup, 20T pulleys on each of the drives. The Z and Y axes SEM motors are mounted onto 1/4" adaptor plates as standard so it is quite a simple job to just stick them into the jig borer rotary table and drill/countersink another set of holes to suit the Leadshine drives. I threaded the Leadshine 1/4" mounting holes to 5/16" BSF so I could re-use the old bolts, job done.





The X axis motor as standard mounts directly to a quite unnecessarily large iron casting, slotted for belt adjustment. I wanted to keep the same motor centre location to re-use the old belts and pulleys but after a bit of head scratching I realised I could mill new slots and bolt head pockets to mount the Leadshine drive easy enough.





For the pulleys the original drives were 5/8" shaft with a collet collar setup but the Leadshines are 14mm. I wanted to re-use the old pulleys so decided to bore the pulleys out to 20mm and make adaptors from 14 to 20mm, modifying the original side plates and bits to suit. The pulleys are a 1 thou interference onto the adaptors and the adaptors a 0.5 thou interference to the motor shafts so that should hold them nicely. Just need the 5mm keyways broaching in then I can add a couple of grub screws to ensure offsets stay where they should be.




I've started pulling the drives and PLC wiring out of the cabinets too, more to come out. Just about everything was single or double interlocked via mechanical relays, and it ran 5v, 24v unregulated, 24v regulated, 30v, 50v, 110v, +180v,-180v and more in the cabinet. Far too many!



Thats progress to date. I pick up the Acorn next week so will get back into the build again soon. In the meantime plenty of time to read the forum info, wiring diagrams etc to get my head in the right place. Any info on the H2-2206 and CHRH units will help too if anyone can help.

Doing some google fu I dug up a Vietnamese manual for those drives. Maybe use google translate on the parameters? surprisingly difficult to find information on those drives.
You could try reaching out to leadshine to see if they have a manual in english. Its also possible they have a version of motion studio you can use on those drives to tune and set parameters.

If you go to the Chinese website for Leadshine products, the H2-2206 is listed, along with a PDF manual.
https://www.leisai.com/cn/fwyzc/index_59.html

If you right click within your browser, you can select "translate to English" (Chrome and other browsers have this feature).

I expect the tuning software will be common across many models.

Download the PDF, go to the Adobe website and use the free online "convert PDF to Word" tool, save as a Word document, then use the Microsoft "Translate document" tool within Word to autotranslate to English. If you really want it it in PDF again, you can "save as PDF".

What you will end up with is little different to what Leadshine and other Chinese manufacturers do ie machine translate the manual. You can also use Google Translate to decipher chunks of text if Microsoft's interpretation leaves you cold, as they use a different translator tool.

Thanks everyone for the drive info, I've been through all the info and also the translated manual linked above. I think I see the problem, maybe. The HBS drives take a 5-24v input for pulse and direction, but it seems the H2-2206 only takes 5v. I thought the drives were basically the same just in a different case, clearly not. The 555 pulse signal generator I made puts out 10v so that may well explain why the HBS drives all work on the bench but the H2's don't. I'll test that theory when I'm back in the workshop later next week.

I don't have the 6 pin firewire to serial cable to use the protuner software but it is possible to test the motor using the front panel buttons on the Leadshine drives.

Back to research on the CHRH VFD, that is still a mystery!

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

Pretty uncommon drive.

WesM wrote: ↑Mon Feb 03, 2025 6:37 pm I would suggest reaching out to the manufacturer directly https://www.chrh.group/support

Pretty uncommon drive.

I've contacted them via the website email address, contact form and also the live chat (which it states they respond immediately....) but after a week I've still not had any reply from them. Who knows, the might not even exist as a company. I might have to try and find someone who speaks Chinese and ask them to call them and see if we can get a response that way. All good fun chasing this foreign stuff and info on it.

Just remembered it was Chinese new year last week, they were probably closed for hols. I'll try again this week.

After a couple of weeks doing far too many long haul flights I'm back home just in time for Valentines day, and a special treat for my wife:



Centroid even thoughtfully wrapped it in nice pink plastic saving my doing a man-wrapping job that usually involves oily bubble wrap and duct tape.

I'd been over in Europe and then Florida, so I had the Centroid stuff delivered to a friend on Orlando and got it off him when we met. It saved a lot of cost and breakage potential having it shipped to Australia. I just put it all in my hand luggage and hand carried it on the 3 long long haul flights home, so I spent the 30-odd hours of flying time dreaming of wiring schematics

Upacking the very well protected and packaged stuff was exciting and so far so good, very happy with how it all looks and is presented by Centroid:





So overall it is an Acorn 6, power supply, wireless MPG, KP-1 probe/ring and a spindle encoder with pre made wiring harness. I'm just downloading the CNC12 v5.24 and will configure a laptop as a temporary CNCPC to get it set up, but I will be running a desktop PC in the mill eventually when I'm running programs.

Laptop spec:


I know not to use the laptop for machining work, I've read the threads and advice. I'm just waiting for a new laptop and docking station to arrive for my office then I will re purpose my old WIn10 desktop that refuses to upgrade to Win11. It is plenty fast enough for a CNCPC:

Desktop spec:


I also ordered a bunch of useful stuff for the build while I was away and most has arrived now, more to follow No wiring and setup work today though, I have a self enforced rule not to do any important work (machining, wiring, riding motorbikes etc) when jet lagged. Too easy to not realise how much brain fog makes you do stupid things you wouldn't normally do.