Denford Microrouter V4

[lucan07]

Many drivers have sw4 on for half voltage I believe this is for standby mode only to solve that problem, but if they are touchable they are probably not to hot they are designed to run hot.

[andy_con]

If I leave my triac on over night the motors are stone cold the next day.

If I machine for an hour and half the motors are still stone cold, so just seems odd on the microrouter

[lucan07]

Likely the way the standby is accomplished, e.g. a PC can be sleeping completely monitoring a 3.3v micro current or running lots uf stuff in background and just turning screen & disks off.

[m_c]

Likely the way the standby is accomplished, e.g. a PC can be sleeping completely monitoring a 3.3v micro current or running lots uf stuff in background and just turning screen & disks off.

Lucan, that post just shows you've got little clue what you're talking about.

Denford are generally very conservative with their tuning. I've ran my little Novamill pretty much non-stop for 4 hours, and the motors only get warm. I suspect the conservative tuning, combined with being mounted to a relatively large lump of iron, means that they're not generating as much heat to begin with, and what heat is produced, is dissipated into a far larger lump of metal than a router.

I'm not aware of Denford using drivers that had reduced standby current, so I doubt that's why they remain as cool.

Why your router is running as hot, could be down to a few factors. Are you running a higher voltage supply? Are you running at a higher current setting than the original drivers?
Without going into specifics, a higher voltage essentially means the driver can force more current into the stepper motor when running at higher speeds (this is where your motor inductance figure comes into play), so the motor is producing more power and more heat.
A higher current setting will cause the motors to produce more power, and heat, while stationary and at speeds up to where the motor induction and driver power supply become the limiting factor as to how much current the driver can force through the motor.

So if you've increase either of those, then that's likely why things are running as hot.
From memory, I think it's acceptable to run steppers up to 80deg C, provided they're not getting that hot quickly i.e. it's fine as long as they take a couple of hours to get that hot. The big thing is that the iron core doesn't overheat to the point it demagnetises, as at that point the motor is only good for the scrap heap.

[lucan07]

I do know very little about Denford machines but I believe they use the Eurostep controller on the Triac, recovering from standby the Eurostep can sometimes need to be reset from the command prompt to enable the amplifier to start thus enabling power to drive to the motors which had been cut presumably by the standby/sleep state.

On the denford system thats getting warm control has been replaced by mach3 a smoothstepper 5 axis bob etc, its hardly a denford controlled or tuned system now, which is why I pointed out a possible difference.

[m_c]

It must of taken a while for you to search for that answer, but it still would not explain why the motors don't warm noticeably after being run for a while.

FWIW Denford used a few different versions of Baldor CNC controllers, but something like a Triac would of most likely used Parker stepper drivers, which from what I remember don't have any kind of current reduction. They're either enabled, or disabled, but commercial machines will rarely disable drives, as you run the risk of losing position during disable/enable.

[lucan07]

My information comes from IT support,for a while I ran a local authority IT dept including education dept and a few Denford's it was one of the recurring jobs talking numpties through the reset, which is why its remembered.

[andy_con]

for info

Triac

running ESS, PMDX126 and original digi plan drivers, it use nema 43 steppers
there is a home brew board between PMDX and digi plan driver which came with the machine


microrouter

running ESS, BOB and drivers as linked to at the start of this thread.

steppers in the microrouter

stepper drivers are running on 36v and set to 2.8amps

[m_c]

I'm bored tonight, so here we go from this thread alone

Many drivers have sw4 on for half voltage I believe this is for standby mode only to solve that problem, but if they are touchable they are probably not to hot they are designed to run hot.

If you had at least some clue, you'd know it's reduced current mode, not voltage mode. Getting a basic thing like that wrong could cause major issues for inexperienced people, or at the very least confuse their understanding of the settings.

Likely the way the standby is accomplished, e.g. a PC can be sleeping completely monitoring a 3.3v micro current or running lots uf stuff in background and just turning screen & disks off.

PC standby should have no effect on stepper motor current, unless the PC is shutting down enough to also shutdown the motion controller and disable the stepper drivers. Also, at this point, Andy had not even mentioned what system his Triac is running.
But given we now know it's Mach, if the computer shut down enough to drop communication with the ESS, I would expect Mach to display an error, or even crash when the computer exits standby.
However, I've never ran an ESS, and all my machine computers are set to never enter standby, and to only shutdown when requested to.

I do know very little about Denford machines but I believe they use the Eurostep controller on the Triac, recovering from standby the Eurostep can sometimes need to be reset from the command prompt to enable the amplifier to start thus enabling power to drive to the motors which had been cut presumably by the standby/sleep state.

On the Denford system thats getting warm control has been replaced by mach3 a smoothstepper 5 axis bob etc, its hardly a denford controlled or tuned system now, which is why I pointed out a possible difference.

So despite not knowing the Triac in question was running Mach/ESS, you posted up about a relatively obscure problem, that probably only affected certain controllers, despite the fact Denford fitted multiple different controllers.


Andy, sorry to do this in your thread, it's just that I hate seeing people post information that is wrong, irrelevant, and/or makes assumptions without knowing the facts or at least mentioning certain things have been assumed.
As I got drummed in to me during my apprenticeship, never assume anything, as it makes an Ass out of U and Me.

[lucan07]

I'm bored tonight, so here we go from this thread alone
If you had at least some clue, you'd know it's reduced current mode, not voltage mode. Getting a basic thing like that wrong could cause major issues for inexperienced people, or at the very least confuse their understanding of the settings.

Current/voltage reduced when not in use, how can this cause a problem?

[/QUOTE]
PC standby should have no effect on stepper motor current, unless the PC is shutting down enough to also shutdown the motion controller and disable the stepper drivers. Also, at this point, Andy had not even mentioned what system his Triac is running.
But given we now know it's Mach, if the computer shut down enough to drop communication with the ESS, I would expect Mach to display an error, or even crash when the computer exits standby.
However, I've never ran an ESS, and all my machine computers are set to never enter standby, and to only shutdown when requested to.
[/QUOTE]

I said triac probablty goes to standby like a pc and quoted pc modes as an example, no problem with this machine so whats your point.

[/QUOTE]
So despite not knowing the Triac in question was running Mach/ESS, you posted up about a relatively obscure problem, that probably only affected certain controllers, despite the fact Denford fitted multiple different controllers.
[/QUOTE]

I new triacs had that facility and problem so mentioned it, it was not regarding the faulty machine rather the one that was working!
Pick your dummy up and go troll somewhere else!