Boost Your CNC Machine with EtherCAT Upgrades

Описание: This video details the upgrade of an old milling machine using LinuxCNC, focusing on the installation and wiring of Zrteligent NEMA 34 closed loop stepper motor. The project incorporates ethercat connected motors for enhanced performance. The machinist demonstrates the setup, highlighting the improvements to the milling machine.

This is a way over the top almost finished upgrade to a HM32 mill that I purchased from a guy who had converted it to Mach3 in a very dodgy way years ago. It used the original leadscrews and rubber hose and hose clamps for misalignment couplings. I sold the Mach3 PC and controller and single phase motor. I replaced the motor that only ran in one direction with a 3 phase one and wired it up to a 5.5 kW 3 phase VFD. I tore out the leadscrews and replaced them with ballscrews. For drives, I used the Rtellignet Ethercat ECT86 closed loop stepper drivers which can accept 80 volts AC. The motors were replaced with NEMA34 closed loop ones from rtelligent. The NEMA24 motor I purchased did not like the bigger drives. They need the ECT60 drive but I wanted to use a 65 volt AC toroid which the ECT60 did not support. So I replaced the NEMA 24 with an open loop NEMA34 I had spare.

I ran up the ethercat config pretty easily on a PC at home but had a lot of trouble because I used Debian Bullseye that the etherlabmaster does not support. Just as I was about to reformat the HDD back to Debian Buster, Linuxcnc user Michel Winja from the Netherlands built a deb file for me that got me out of trouble once I set up the linker include paths and worked out a way to load the ethercat driver on startup.

I tried hard to use the built in CIA402 homing feature of these drives but was unable to get it working. I think homing.c needs modifications to get this working. So I reverted to normal linuxcnc homing which is waiting for a couple of prox sensors to complete.

This build also incorporates a safety relay.

The HMI was plasma cut and houses a 15" touch screen and an Odroid H2+ PC that unfortunately is no longer made.

There is a bit more wiring to do and then I'll be tackling the spindle which needs to be controlled through the VFD as I don't have anything on the ethercat bus to do it differently.

So stay tuned as I finish this off.