Replace Delta Tau with Allen Bradley

I am curious

boyd_man said:

I have a machine that cuts fluts in drill bits, the machine is controlled by a PC with Delta Tau PCI cards.

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Why? The Delta Tau cards are pretty good once you figure them out.

The Delta Tau cards controll six Baldor Flex Drives (FD2AO5TR-RN20). What would it take to replace the PC and Delta Tau with Allen Bradley to controll the Flex Drives[/SIZE][/FONT]

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If you want to simply replace the DT cards you would need a Control Logix and 3 M02AE cards unless the Baldor Flex drives can communicate with Sercos.

If the application is one where the torque must be controlled and limited by a speed or position then you may need something that can control the inner torque loop too.

Peter Nachtwey said:

If you want to simply replace the DT cards you would need a Control Logix and 3 M02AE cards unless the Baldor Flex drives can communicate with Sercos.

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Peter
Have you ever found anybodies drives that will talk to AB over SERCOS? I haven't found anybody yet. I keep hearing from several other manufacture reps. about "AB SERClose almost SERCOS"

Your working on my machines. We built those several years ago. I talked to Dennis several months back about doing some upgrades but he never got back to me after they were sold out of KMT. If you get to do something with them let me know and I might be able to give you some ideas.

JeffKiper said:

Peter
Have you ever found anybodies drives that will talk to AB over SERCOS? I haven't found anybody yet. I keep hearing from several other manufacture reps. about "AB SERClose almost SERCOS"

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No, and so far I am not a fan of Sercos. I can find all sorts of flaws in Sercos but it seems that marketing hype is winning. I can go into details if requested.

The problem with Rockwell Sercos being different from others is trouble some. We can reverse engineer what is going on but there are more profitable ways to spend our engineering resources.

Overall i think ideas like Sercos or EtherCat are good ones but there are fine details that cause me to doubt. I still like communicating to all the peripherals in parallel and at the same time instead of over a serial bus.

CharlesM said:

Your working on my machines. We built those several years ago. I talked to Dennis several months back about doing some upgrades but he never got back to me after they were sold out of KMT. If you get to do something with them let me know and I might be able to give you some ideas.

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Hi Charles, It is a pleasure working on your machines, easy to trouble shoot and set up, I have everything I need installed on each machine to do most of my trouble shooting. Dennis could be planning on getting back with you. I told him I would like to put controllogix in them and he told me to let him know what it would take. Where I come from we used a lot of Controllogix, Pacific Scientific, and Sanyo Denki. What I’m not sure of is what A/B has In Controlloix that will work with these drives.

Originally posted by JeffKiper:

Have you ever found anybodies drives that will talk to AB over SERCOS? I haven't found anybody yet. I keep hearing from several other manufacture reps. about "AB SERClose almost SERCOS"

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There is the 1756-M08SEG. This is an AB 1756 8-axis motion controller that supports generic SERCOS. We used several on a job about a year back with Indramat DKC. However, you need to "prove" to AB that you can't use their drives. Had our customer not forced us to stay internal to AB with the control we would have use an Indramat PPC controller.

The funny thing is that, from what I am told, AB developed the SERCOS card firmware using Indramat drives because their own drives weren't done and they had nothing to test them with anyway since the SERCOS interface was tweeked. After they got things to work they modified the firmware so it wouldn't work with 3rd party drives.

Keith

Hi Charles, It is a pleasure working on your machines, easy to trouble shoot and set up, I have everything I need installed on each machine to do most of my trouble shooting. Dennis could be planning on getting back with you. I told him I would like to put controllogix in them and he told me to let him know what it would take. Where I come from we used a lot of Controllogix, Pacific Scientific, and Sanyo Denki. What I’m not sure of is what A/B has In Controlloix that will work with these drives.

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A lot can be said for getting something in you can work on. In a perfect world we would still be working for big K and I would still be making and supporting these machines but that's not the world we live in. I take pride in the work that I do and have done. The first machines were not very good but I think the last 10-15 were good machines. I wish we would have skipped a few of the big ones and worked more on the small ones. We were working on designs for the smaller ones when they closed the engineering department. I think those designs were passed along to you guys but I am not sure. From a control stand point it would only take some small programming changes to adapt the same concepts to them.

I think your getting some good info here for an AB solution. Make sure you get a quality motor and cables that will hold up to the oil. I only talked to Dennis about the computer, software and PMAC. I was planning on using the same software and just updating the computer and PMAC card. Advantec has some computers with solid state drives. I think they would hold up much better than what you have. Send me a PM here and I will send you an email with my contact info. Whatever you end up doing I would like to know how it works out. I may also be able to give you some tips. It's not rocket science but just a hand full of things that might help. I think we did some good things on getting the burns out and on the loaders.

Good luck.