Advice Needed, Converting a Boxford VMC 190

[swood1]

PS> I may have the wiring diagram for the lenze board

[Edvard_acz]

Thanks m_c
All the explanation was awesome :)

[swood1]

Hi M100,

Sorry for the delay with this. Can I ask have you managed to get the Boxford to run using Mach3 without upgrading all the stepper drives? I did look at this but it looks a bit messy trying to tap into the original stepper drives. I have managed to get my machine running by just bypassing the main stepper drive board and installing my own stepper drives in the cabinet. I have disconnected the power from the original board. The Bradford board I believe is something to do with the tool change system (Z axis), although I think there is a sensor on the spindle for possibly height and angle to aid tool changing which I belive could be performed using a macro in mach3 (apparently).

On running my machine the stepper drives keep missing steps (so a circle becomes a spiral), I think this is mainly due to them being really cheap ones off fleebay. I am thinking of upgrading the stepper drives and totaly ripping out the original boards and starting again.

Happy tinkering.

[SimonD]

To those of you who have been trying to contact me to get the wiring diagrams. I do still have them but cannot reply to your private messages as your accounts are set to not receive replies!
I do not frequent these forums regularly so you will have to contact me offline. I can be reached on simon (at) byte (hyphen) sized (dot) com

[uli12us]

Hi Simon, if you can send me the wiring Diagram of the 190, than this will help me a lot, with the modifications of my new 165HMC. It seems, it has the same controller Board, but for the 4th axe it use the same external board double (but why, it seems, the board can control 2 stepperdrivers) , like in the 190. Today I tried to make a single step with a separate momentswitch, but unfortunately without success. The driver for the tool turret seems the same as from the 125 and 160TCL. Only a DC supply with not many regulations, that stops after each 45°, with a simple NC switch. I have 4 relays and a bigger one for the switch on of the control unit. One is for the doorswitch, the second one switch the spindle motor on or off, i can regulate the controller with the switch on the front control panel. But I don't know, what the 2 other do.
Ok in the meantime I know what are the other relays.
the middle switches the spindle Motor on and the last (near the On relay) changes the direction. The complete machine runs, without any issues in Tipmode.
of the spindle.

[Subash]

Hi Everyone,

I am trying to convert a Boxford VMC 190 using aCNC-USB box from Eding. I found that the output voltages to the motor drives from the boxford processor (xd, xc, zd, zc, cl5 and cl6) and the Eding CNC-USB box to be similar. Since the eding software has some setup functions it is also possible to tweak these voltage vales to match the Boxford processors voltage. While I still haven't checked the spindle voltage levels, My idea is to simply replace the boxford processors pins with the Eding CNC-USB box pins since the signals they both output seem to match. However I am new to this and any advice would be great. By the way do any of you guys have the hardware wiring schematics of the Boxford VMC 190?

[swood1]

Hi Subash,

I am not aware of Edin or CNC-USB. For mine I ended up using a Ethernet Smoothstepper and a PMDX-126 Breakout board. I removed the main processing board but retained the board with e stepper drives on and tapped directly into that. With this I have obviously lost my tool change facility and the ability to use the control panel on the machine but I can atleast run the machine as a CNC machine including spindle.

I need to learn more about how to setup the I/O on the breakout board, maybe then I can work out how to integrate the emergency stop etc.

But overall I believe the best way to actually upgrade this machine is to do what others have done and that is to rip out the whole interior and upgrade the lot. This will unfortunately cost a bit of money if you want Gecko drives etc.

Regards

Steven

[murrayg]

Hi Subash,

If you would like to upgrade to Geckodrives then you might be pleased to know we have a special offer giving 30% off basket total. You can find the Geckodrives on our site here

Please use discount code "ccxmas2016". It is only valid once so please make sure you have everything you need in your basket before checking out.

As a member of this forum you can also get 15% discount on all Geckodrives by using discount code "mycncuk" on any future purchases.

Regards