Fiber optic/SERCOS controlled drives?

[markharris]

I'm looking at convering a large industrial CNC router over to UC CNC, however the drives are all fibreoptic controlled, they are Indramat who are a member of the SERCOS group - so I can only guess they are running SERCOS 2 protocol. Is there a way to interface with the drives, or use sercos drives in general from UC CNC?

I'd look at coding up a microcontroller to do it, but it seems you'd have to pay to get access to the sercos spec? There's some ARM related mentions from TI on the A8 processors for SERCOS 3. NetX have an interesting IC for industrial comms, but it's only a SERCOS slave, not a master.

I might need to replace one of the drives in any case with a new one as i'm told it's faulty, but replacing every drive on a large gantry router with ATC is likely a very expensive prospect?

[cncdrive]

Unfortunately I know nothing about the Sercos protocol, I did not even hear about it so far.
I think it would be probably possible to make a microcontroller which reads the step/dir signals from the UCCNC and send the required commands to the servo drives,
but ofcourse this is only a guess from me because I don1t know the Sercos protocol at all and how it exactly works.

If you have to exchange the servo drives then it is likely that you will also have to change the motor or at least the encoder or at least that would be probably much easier than to find a drive to your motors, because servomotors especially AC ones come with many different encoder protocols. Often manufacturers make and implement their own protocols for the encoder communication because they want to make sure that you will not use your motor with another brand drive and that you will also not use the drive with another brand motor.

[Battwell]

i used allen bradley sercos drives in my triac mill conversion to uccnc.
there is very little info on them and most people think they are useless so they are very cheap on ebay.
all their sercos drives are fully programmable and using their software you can switch off the sercos section and use follower for step/direction instead
shame you didnt get the machine mark. ( i pointed it to you originally on my facebook group)
the ab drives are superb- they were the only drives i could get to run the original fanuc red cap motors . another first for me. fanuc is one of the manufacturers that dont want you driving their motors with anything else! - theres always a way if your willing to play- or pay !
brendon

[tecfacet]

Can you tell me hou you converted the SERCOS drives to something else?
Maybe it was with a specific version of the UltraWare software??
I just got 6 of these drives and the motors for them.