Servo as a spindle motor replacement - what to look out for?

[m_c]

I started writing a reply to this earlier, then got side tracked.

Dean's answered all the questions, so I'll just add a couple comments for anybody else.

Position mode officially requires a pulsed input (or some form of serial communication if the drive is fancy enough), which can usually take the form of Step/Dir, CW/CCW, or Quadrature input. Quadrature is the best option as it eliminates pulse timing issues, although as this is a spindle, that's not really an issue.

Speed/Torque are analogue modes. The key difference between speed and torque mode, is torque mode bypasses some of the internal drive filtering. It can allow better drive tuning if you're running it closed loop, but is often harder to tune as it's inherently more unstable.
If you wanted, you could just run speed mode, and interface in a similar way to old controller, it all depends on how accurately you want to control your spindle speed.


As for excess cable, if they can't be shortened simply, just cable tie them out the way somewhere.