Quote Originally Posted by JAZZCNC View Post
I'm surprised how much these have dropped in price, last time I looked, which must admit is quite some time ago, Yaskawa kits were like $900-$1100 range for 400W. I've never used them for this reason so I may look at these when a suitable job comes up.! . . . How easy or hard are they to setup/tune.? Do Yaskawa supply the Sigma tuning software for free.?

I'm surprised the absolute encoders are cheaper as well, not as many controllers about that can accept Absolute positioning so I would have expected them to be more. Thou absolute systems and Bus/Ethercat drives/controllers are coming down in price and more popular so maybe this is the reason.?
Yes of course software is free. I'm not yet to the point of tuning but having read the manual multiple times I don't expect many issues. You start with the auto-tuning and fine-tune from there.

IMO rotary absolute encoders are not worth the hassle. Their only use in a router/mill context is to spare you the homing after power-up. And obviously the controller must be able to interpret the special Yaskawa protocol and I think no hobby controller can at this point. It could be done with some knowledge with LinuxCNC+Mesa.