Some good steps towards driving our cnc-mill with DC-servos taken today. I got the pico-systems servodrives wired correctly, the new 50 kHz PWM m5i20 configuration loaded onto the fpga, and updated my pyvcp test panel a bit. I'm using three 19" rack enclosures. The lower one has a 1.8 kVA transformer, the middle one houses the servodrives, and the top one has differential encoder cards for the motors and optoisolator interfaces to the m5i20.
One small setback was that the servodrives wanted the PWM in reverse polarity compared to what I had available. There's nothing in the m5i20 driver to reverse the polarity of the DAC output PWM. Fortunately the drives have optocoupler inputs so instead of GND-PWM I wired them in a PWM-Vcc configuration and it worked OK. I did an open-loop no load test (below) where I monitored the RPM while changing the DAC output. There's a bit of dead-band in the middle where nothing happens between DAC values of about -0.2 and +0.2. After that the curve is pretty linear up to +9.7 after which the PWM pulse becomes unacceptably short for the servodrive and at DAC=9.8 or above the motors just jump and stutter. So eventually with EMC and PID control I need to limit the DAC range to [-9.7 , +9.7].
Next is probably trying out closed-loop PID control, and after that I need to look at the E-stop chain, home switches, a relay for the flood coolant pump, and controlling the VFD/Spindle.
