JeffLowe

... - perhaps a upgrade path for these applications would be to move to the new Power PMAC IPC, this is a I7 Windows PC with Power PMAC embedded. If I'm thinking right on this now you have nothing but Memory transfer rates to get your Gcode to the Buffer. This eliminates the Ethernet or PCI bus. -however this also limits you to ECAT to drives/IO which may not give us the preformance needed at the drive ? ------------------------------------------------- In the past we have been told by Delta Tau that the EtherCat Servo would have too much jitter for High Precision multiaxis contouring. This is why our jew project ended up with a Macro ring for 5 axis 0.1 micron class machining. Does the PowerPMAC IPC support Macro? Thanks

When we have been asked by our customers to upgrade a legacy NC system from Windows whatever (NT4, 2000, or XP) with a Turbo PMAC2 ISA, historically we have required them to purchase a new Turbo PMAC2 PCI as the PCommServer device drivers were not comparable for ISA units. With the termination of this upgrade path for our customers employing these units (approximately 150 machines at $450K each), is there a way to make PCommServer work for ISA Turbo PMAC2 boards under 32 bit Windows 7?

I guess the end of life notice somehow slipped by us. I understand the AD1868 DAC chips are discontinued, but does Delta Tau plan a replacement board? We have roughly 1200 of these in the field, and have somewhere around 1-2% per year failure rate on them.

The SRM refers this section to "Shared-memory accessories (mostly from third party suppliers)" Are such dual port ram boards available for the 460 or 465 Umac CPUs and if so, where? Would they include crossbar switching to handle the endian difference between PPC and x86?

Switch method. Copley drives come up without issue, but 11M remains in a "d" state until macroslave$$$3 is issued from the console. We have a subsequent file read by the PPMAC for personalization that is basically a gpascii -i/file so I have added the reset to that and it works ok, but this should not be necessary.

Is there a way to read an Encoder as processed through the Encoder Table without having to create a motor attached to that EncTable entry? I need to monitor the difference between two encoders, which is easily setup in an Encoder Table, but I do not wish to incur the overhead of additional motors to do so.

Is there a minimum startup time for initialization of the ACC11m? The only way I can get the 11 do go from disconnected to ready (status LED d to status O) is to issue a macroslave$$$n from the IDE. I have added reset to both the beginning and end of the pp_startup.txt, and also in PLC1. I have added timers up to 10 seconds delaying it until issuing a cmd"macroslave$$$3"; All with no change in state. Only the reset from the IDE command prompt will change the macro state from disconnected to ready. There are no plcs running in the 11M. Should there be?

Is there any way to determine how memory is being allocated in the Power PMAC? Recently I added two 2048 element Cam Tables which caused a download error which prevented reboot even though the project loaded without errors. Looking in the log files showed a corrupt syntax in a line which was correct in the project. Removing the cam tables corrected the issues. The project is operating with the default table size of 1 megabyte and the combined size of our compensation tables and the cam tables is less than 50k. It is behaving like some pointer is going into the wild, and I'd like to verify where the memory is being used.

Yes, the Dover amplifier (Glentek) has a seven segment display for faults. Also check if ix57 and ix58 are set for i2t protection. These also look like amplifier faults.

We are using an absolute position BissC scale that reports a 32 bit absolute position at power on. This machine will also use compensation tables to remove any intrinsic scale errors and mounting issues. Does the motor position as initialized by the power on read include the compensation correction? That is, if I am at some raw scale position that would have a corresponding correction, is the motor initialized to the corrected value? Thanks

We do our logging to a CIFS shared directory on a PC. It makes viewing, management and cleanup much easier. Large SD cards are also a reasonable alternative.

Add a third entry after the first two and use summing to add them EncTable[0].type=1 EncTable[0].pEnc=Acc84E[0].Chan[0].SerialEncDataA.a EncTable[0].type=1 EncTable[1].pEnc=Acc84E[0].Chan[0].SerialEncDataA.a EncTable[2].type=8 EncTable[2]pEnc=EncTable[0].PrevEnc.a EncTable[2]pEnc2=EncTable[1].PrevEnc.a

I don't know how to read MI920. I have been asking this throughout this thread. Nothing in the Power PMAC MACRO manual shows how to do this. (Note: The manual is very good and comprehensive on setting up the hardware, establishing the ring, and getting servo data to and from the ring) What I am finding is that the available documentation and the macro project lack any definition of the nomenclature used. My system consists of a Power PMAC CPU, an ACC5e3, which provides two rings: ring 0 and ring 1, I am only using ring 0, and on it I have 6 Copley Xenus drives, and an ACC11M, used as a triple node. The documentation and example projects talk a lot about macro masters and macro slaves addressing stations with i6840 and i6841 which to my way of thinking are turbo pmac stuff and must be for addressing macro 8 axis and 16 Axis Macro CPUs The two Copley drives that contain absolute position in i920 are on ring 0, at node 0 and node 1. Can you please show me how to get these MI920 variables from the drives? Thanks,

This does something, but I am not sure what. I have pointed the encoder status to [NODE][3] register 3 which contains the other encoder status information such as encoder loss, position compare, and position loss. The values on startup are not the same as the amplifier reports. The system is a gantry system with absolute encoders. The drives are showing X1, and X2 positions within half a millimeter, (342.1xxx mm vs 341.7xxx) The PMAC reports thes2 as 600 something mm and 0 7xxx mm. Further suggestions?

Type 4 is for Sinusoidal/arctangent extension which are incremental by nature, typically an ACC51E card. My system is a Macro system based on the Copley XML drives. A BissC encoder (Renishaw Resolute) comes in through the drive and is presented in Macro register 0 as the upper 24 bits in a 32 bit word. Standard parallel word position feedback stuff. The encoder itself is a 32 bit, so even if I do a power on absolute position from the node's Macro Register 0, I will be missing the upper eight bits. There does not appear to be any automatic way of retrieving the full 32 bit position from a macro node for initial power-up absolute positioning. What I need is a piece of script plc to be executed at startup to read this 32 bit position from i920 and stuff it into the motor's position register before servo on.

I have been searching for some example script code showing how to read a macro I variable. I am using a Copley Xenus Macro drive with absolute encoders. The power on absolute position is available in i920 as a 32 bit integer which I would like to use as power on position for my axes. In the Macro documentation I have found some commands one of which is : MacroAuxiliaryRead , < Global Var> Read an MI, MM, MP or MQ variable from to There is no documentation on what the meaning of MI,MM,MPor MQ mean nor any syntax for making such a call. Does anyone have this information, or perhaps better Macro documentation or some example code?

Which version of Firmware? 2.0.0.1 works ok, the current release 2.0.2.14 does not work. Is there a newer version?

The features were added to do this. I was wondering if any writeup has been done yet on using this?

Where can I find this "Power PMAC Modbus Design Document". We are contemplating using a modbus stepper driver for a simple tool changer.

L-Com SP8790x

How do I get the IDE to retain the position display window formatting between sessions. Every time I close the IDE and Open it again the # of motors reverts to 4, and the # of decimal places gets set to a default of 2. This is quite painful with 14 defined motors, each requiring 6 or more decimal places.

From post ACC5E unavailable. We have been running with MuxIO.UpdatePeriod = 5 and MuxIO.ClockPeriod = 8 from version 1.5 through version 2.0.0.1 with Acc34 class devices. It is only the latest version (2.0.2.14) that does not work. I assume 2.0.2.14 was the new firmware you were referencing Prior when you sere suggesting a ClockPeriod=400 and UpdatePeriod=48?

Do you have examples of the .dll calls in C#, C++ or VB for accessing this from the PC side?

Are there any app notes or examples on using the background reporting features of the turbo PMAC?

On Turbo I could read D:$00xDA/5A to retrieve the ongoing integrated current above my threshold value (Ixx57). This was useful in some cases for adaptive power limiting. Is there an equivalent intermediate variable in PPMAC?