Retrofit Haas Mini Mill to UCCNC

[Delco]

I am considering retrofitting my Haas mini mill to UCCNC or maybe Centroid
I have done at least 20 UCCNC setups on hobby stuff so leaning more towards UCCNC and I have 4 of my own machines with it.

Long story but I have a 2019 Haas mini mill and have just resurrected it after it was full flooded under water for 2 days. I have replaced all the bearings and cleaned everything , I have checked and the next gen control is all functioning and was working all ok .
I have never run this machine before and had to install a phase changer to get the 415V AC three phase hookup . on testing I found that if the spindle was ramped up as a direct on it drew too much current and shut the whole system down completely with a low voltage alarm then contactors dropped out. If I ramped the rpm slowly from 1000 to the max of 10 000rpm it was fine.

Now on all my other machines I would go into the VFD and slow the acceleration of the spindle down , HAAS run a vector drive which is controlled by the controller and here is where I run into my first problem - all the parameters are locked out and to be able to gain access to a service key to modify I was quoted 11k

Second issue was that since I had removed the drive belt the motor encoder was not synched with the spindle orientation required for a tool change - again another parameter with no access to , a tech from haas would need to come out to do that , I am 600kms away from any tech

on talking to some friend it was suggested the true 240 v leg the controller operates off may be on the wrong leg of the transformer so I swapped 2 phases over - this would normally just reverse direction of the motor BUT in this case it shorted out the vector drive causing a DC bush short error - next issue 10K for a new vector drive.

So as it stands I am looking at going back to my original though when I bought the flooded unit.

The issues as I see it
1. UCCNC cant drive the axis drives ( I would need to buy new compatable ones - not haas) in closed loop feedback mode , only step and direction.
2. Rigid tapping control with a spindle encoder/servo setup
3. Homing switches needed as the servo encoder cannot be read anymore as different drives
4. I find the homing switches of various types are not accurate enough to give repeatability to use zero point fixtures.
5. Geneva Toolchanger carousel uses dc motors for rotation and feeding in
6. Integrating the renishaw wireless probing system and all its complex macros
7. Fusion part probing routines not working
8. Most probably more important - will the control system be able to get the control and surface finishes a industrial control has ?

Hopefully anyone who has encountered these issue and overcome them will chime in with a solution.

[formantjim]

Hi Delco, I'm currently retrofitting a Tree 325 Mill with UCCNC replacing the VFD servo drives and Delta 20 Controls. I've managed to find that the motor has an inbuilt resolver to allow rigid tapping which is very handy indeed and I've built a simple circuit to convert the signals for the ETH300 to take in. The servo's I'm using are Teknic Clearpath with custom adaptors for the power pulleys to allow them to fit on the Clearpath shafts.
UCCNC with its ETH300 has all the necessary input and outputs for probing etc. As regards limit switches I'm using proximity switches similar to the ones I have on my diy machine at home and they achieve fantastic accuracy but more importantly repeatability. UCCNC software comes with a lot of plugins that are very useful for all types of jobs you will not be disappointed.

[cncdrive]

1.) Yes, that could be problematic if the drives are old and using analog +-10Volts signals.
2.) UCCNC can do rigid tapping, it does not matter what spindle control do you have. It can do rigid tapping even if you only have 2 spindle CW/CCW relays.
The only important thing is that the UCCNC must be able to switch the spindle on/off to both directions for the rigid tapping to work.
3.) Yes, that have to be added.
4.) Why not using inductive sensors, most types have very good repeatability.
5.) Not sure why this is a problem.
6.) Yep.
7.) Can you show some more info about this?
8.) Comparing to which industrial controller and which machine?

We built this machine last time, I think it gives a good surface finish, because it is a very rigid machine: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4455&start=10

[formantjim]

To expand on CNCDRIVE's comment on point 5) I meant inductive proximity sensors they are ultra reliable and deadly repeatable.
And in agreement if you have a rigid machine in the first place like the Tree the surface finish will be excellent.

[Delco]

To expand on CNCDRIVE's comment on point 5) I meant inductive proximity sensors they are ultra reliable and deadly repeatable.
And in agreement if you have a rigid machine in the first place like the Tree the surface finish will be excellent.

All my other machines have inductive proximity switches BUT I find there repeatability to not be 100% accurate enough to home and come back to the zero point G54 everytime - there is always a very small error - which is not a issue if reprobing the zero point fixture each startup . With the built in encoder homing on the haas originally it repeats more precisely every time.

Maybe I need better quality than the chinese inductive sensors.

[Delco]

1.) Yes, that could be problematic if the drives are old and using analog +-10Volts signals.
2.) UCCNC can do rigid tapping, it does not matter what spindle control do you have. It can do rigid tapping even if you only have 2 spindle CW/CCW relays.
The only important thing is that the UCCNC must be able to switch the spindle on/off to both directions for the rigid tapping to work.
3.) Yes, that have to be added.
4.) Why not using inductive sensors, most types have very good repeatability.
5.) Not sure why this is a problem.
6.) Yep.
7.) Can you show some more info about this?
8.) Comparing to which industrial controller and which machine?

We built this machine last time, I think it gives a good surface finish, because it is a very rigid machine: https://forum.cncdrive.com/viewtopic.ph ... 5&start=10

5. I havent looked as yet on how the tool carousel works but was told uccn couldnt drive a dc motor to a position ?
6. Can uccnc use the std renishaw probing routines as delivered for a haas or fanuc machine ?
7. I have not found a post processor that can do the built in fusion probing routines such as https://youtu.be/dnO2NHzwwJg?si=rZU-2Xcs4ui26jRq

I have a few spare UC300 combos , maybe I just need to fit it and see what problems I run into

[cncdrive]

5.) DC motors could be driven with a DC servo drive, e.g. with the DG4S drives then they can be controlled with step/dir input.
Ofcourse you need an incremental encoder on the DC motor.
6.) I'm sorry, but I'm not familiar with these probing routines. You could ask my collegue dezsoe, he wrote the UCCNC probing plugin.
7.) Try to ask Autodesk (the Fusion360 developers) to fit their post processor, they are usually pretty fast on answering and solving these kind of requests. (Or at least they were a few years ago when they made the UCCNC post processor.)
The only limitation with the UCCNC is that currently it can only probe one axis at a time, so you can't probe diagonally. I don't know if this is even required for what you want to achive, but thought to mention this limitation.
We have plans though to develop the multiaxis G31, but I'm not sure when will we get there with the developments.

[dezsoe]

6.) I couldn't find anything on the Renishaw home page that you cannot do using the probe screen. Could you explain what do you need?

[Delco]

6.) I couldn't find anything on the Renishaw home page that you cannot do using the probe screen. Could you explain what do you need?

The std probing screens on uccnc are more than adequate to use manually . What I would like to achieve is in Gcode process measurement using the fusion 360 interface.
Much like this https://youtu.be/dnO2NHzwwJg?si=17fYZn2zdldY1cXs

And like this https://youtu.be/1yz9vD1JP0k?si=qIToTjb9xtsvk_KS

Its not a essential but a nice to have feature that the Haas already has .

[cncdrive]

And why is this not working with UCCNC?
Whats on the video could be done using G31 codes in g-code in my opinion.
So, the question is why do you think this is not working?
Did you try it?
Can you post an example probing g-code file which Fusion generated?