Calling all servo people - vendors too...

Greetings all!

I recently learned that the Electrocraft/Bru/Micro DSM servo products are going the way of the dinosaurs, and by that I mean extinct. So I've been researching a new line of servo drives for our facilty, and since we are loaded with products from these series, there are ALOT of drives to buy in the future...

I've been examining the Automation Direct SureServo series, and I even bought one to test. I've been super-impressed. They are as powerful, easy to use and operate as they've been advertised., and are loaded with standard features. Unfortunately, they only get up to 3kW, and I need more power than that on several of my applications.

My salesman is promoting Sanyo, and they look like a great series of powerful drives, and very inexpensive. But they don't offer modbus on many of their units, and since using it on the AD product, I've become addicted to automatic parameterisation...

Emerson offers a full range with modbus, but they are pricey. AB offers a full range, no modbus, and pricey.

So I'm in the market for a line of servo drives that covers 500W to 10kW or more, supports modbus (serial or TCP) and offers indexing as a standard feature or add-on, reasonably priced.

Seconodarily to the modbus, I'd be willing to entertain a drive that had a SIMPLE ascii command structure, with no overly-elaborate checksum scheme.

Anyone have any favorites?

TM

I thought the transition was Electrocraft, Reliance Electric, Rockwell Automation. I suspect AB would be the logical choice for a replacement, possibly drop-in. They may be providing repair service for your current drives.
It's probably best to the way you are now by retrofitting to the latest technology.

I started with ABs servos right after they took over Electrocraft. I was using the Ultra 100 and 200 series (now Silver series). I have since moved up to the Ultra 3000 using either the Index version or the SERCOS with Contrologix or Compactlogix. I love SERCOS. We used to use Emerson on Modbus, but I found AB much simpler to use. Also Emersons repair time is long. As an OEM, this meant I had to stock their Drives which would run out the warranty.
If you use more then 3 drives, I would recommend using their Kinetix drives (Price and built in safety).

I also have the same problem with the electrocraft product. AB didn't offer a direct replacement for the motors. I found that to be very odd. Fortunately I only have a handful of them.

AB did say they are going to start remaking some of the servo motors that we have, but they will not work with the Electrocraft drive. That made no sense to me but whatever. I am now replacing them with Emerson, since I have some of there stuff elsewhere in the plant.

Note: The main difference I found with the AD Sureservo stuff is the motor dimensions were not made to the same standard as the Electrocraft. They have different Bolt Circle Diameters. Emerson and several other companies do follow the same dimensions.

Thanks Gerry, I'd looked at Emerson, and on your notes, I'll give them a second look. Maybe time to call the rep.

TM

Anybody have an opinion on Yaskawa servos?


TM

Never heard a bad thing about Yaskawa. Seen alot of them on CNCs.

I actually have a very high opinion on Yaskawa servos, but I may be biased. Of course, as usually is the case with some foreign manufacturers, the manuals may be not the easiest to read.

However, I am not aware of Modbus capabilities for Yaskawa servo drives.

Some can use Modbus TCP/IP with Ethernet.
http://www.yaskawa.com/site/products.nsf/subGroup/SingleAxisMotionControllers.html

I was going to suggest Yaskawa but y'all have more experience with servos overall, plus I was not sure about the cost comparison issue. There was a time they were competitive with pricing.

I forgot to mention GE Fanuc. They are all over our CNC machines. I priced them out 3-4 years ago and they were competitive with other offerings. I don't know how there drives meet your spec.'s regarding the modbus, indexing, etc.

I agree the Yaskawa servo manuals leave a bit to be desired when reading them. I highly recommend reading any manual several times before attempting to do any programming on that device.

Like the Yaskawa VFD's the servos are a right nice piece of equipment.

I like the AB Ultra Master servos. One of my customers has a few of them and they were easy to figure out.

rsdoran said:

Some can use Modbus TCP/IP with Ethernet.
http://www.yaskawa.com/site/products.nsf/subGroup/SingleAxisMotionControllers.html

Click to expand...

Yes, I know - but that is a motion controller which snaps onto a servo drive (not any servo drive, BTW). My understanding was that Timothy is looking for a different servo but is not considering dropping whatever motion controller and/or PLC he is using.

P.S. Yaskawa's pricing, AFAIK has been pretty good - at least comparing to AB's.