Hi
Four month ago I bought a perfectly good TC229 with the conversational control for about $7000 with the conversational control. I went to some trouble to get one that was in good shape mechanically, I couldn't measure any backlash using a tenth indicator.
My original hope was to keep the original Sanyo Denki motors and drives but I found that the Brother control was talking to the drives with some sort of serial format so I gave up on the Sanyo denki drives. The motors are four pole brushless servos with incremental encoders (5000 lines for XYand Z, 1024 lines for the spindle) and no hall sensors. After spending 40 hours of research and another 40 hours of experimenting I managed to get all the axis motors running with AB Ultra3000 which has an algorithm that allows it to determine its commutation based on the encoder pulses without the use of hall sensors. I made a bunch of educated guesses for motor values such as inductance, resistance, rated current, torque constant etc, if anyone needs help with the specifics they should email me, it took me a long time to figure it all out. Overall I am happy with drives they allow a lot of flexibility in configuring the IO and the Ultraware software works well. Many of the used Ultra3000 drives on Ebay have the SERCOS network feature but I found that the software allows you to disable this and use the either step and direction or analogue commands. I have a mix of 2098-010 and 2098-020 models. I will need the higher current 020 for the z axis.
The z axis is not counterbalanced, the z axis motor has a brake, one the brake is disabled (24V) the z-axis drops at an alarming rate, I found this out the hard way. Unfortunately the commutation routine needed for the Ultra3000 does not occur until a few seconds after the enable pin goes high, the brake is released as soon as the enable pin goes high. I did find that the drive was able to successfully perform the commutation routine with the brake on, this surprised me but I think I will try to control the brake with the ladder in LinuxCNC, as the drive can provide a signal that the commutation routine was successful. I have not actually tested this yet.
My original plan was to use an Ultra3000 to run the spindle as well, the problem with this plan is that drive runs out of voltage before the motor gets to its top speed of 10000 rpm. The drives I have can run with an input voltage of 120-240v. When I put 120V in I could only get the motor to go to about 3600RPM, meaning 240V would get me 7200 Rpm max. The other problem is that an Ultra3000 that would be capable of driving this motor to full capacity would be costly ($1500 on Ebay). I am now researching VFDs that are capable of driving permanent magnet motors, this will hopefully allow for field weakening that will allow me to drive the motor to 10000 rpm. Orienting the spindle will be more of a challenge with a VFD instead of a servo.
I have a Mesa 5I25 and 7I76 daughter card, my plan is to run the axis motor in step and direction mode, and use the classic ladder to control the tool changer. It looks like the toolchanger has some sort of 5 bit sensor that indicates position and a three phase motor driven cam indexer to rotate the turret. loading and unloading the tool appears to be done by a mechanical linkage powered by the motion of the z-axis.
With some luck I hope to have the control panel finished and the various motors and sensors wired up within a month. I will post more info as I struggle through.