Centruion 5

[ironmonger]

A friend of mine has a Tree mill with a Milltronics Centurion 5 control on it. Can anyone tell me if the output to the servo amplifies is analog or step/direction?
Trying to help with a dead X/Y axis problem. The encoders are providing DRO information, and I am trying to find alternatives to resurrect the CNC function.
Thanks
Paul

[Toolguy]

I have 2 Milltronics Centurion 6 mills and they are both analog signal. It's most likely that the 5 is also. The conversational programming on these is super easy and fast. These machines are both 2001 vintage. I've had one since 2001 and one since Dec. 2010. I use them every day to make a living. They hardly ever have any problems. I've had about 4 weeks of downtime in 10 years. It will be worth the effort to get that control running.

[macona]

All Milltronics controls are analog out.

So the encoder feed info back to the head unit. What happens you try to activate the servos?

Milltronics has excellent customer support. Call them.

[ironmonger]

When I got involved with this mill one of the servo amplifier boards had been sent out for repair and as soon as the board was powered up an electrolytic cap that had been installed reverse polarity by the repair facility exploded and removed part of the trace on the pc board.

I replaced the cap and bypassed the trace with wire. I was not able to determine if anything on the bottom of the board had been damaged, i didn't want to unsolder the four power transistors to check. From what I could tell on the schematic, there was nothing else that I could see that should have been damaged.

The boards powered up without smoke, when you try to home the x and y axis, (I don't remember the key-press sequence) the display indicated servos on, we then pressed the key that would home the x and y axis' and we got a momentary indication that the process had started then the servos went off again.

As I mentioned before, the DRO stuff works, and the mill is useful in manual mode. If this repair costs to much the owner might elect to power the servo and re-purpose the limit switches and settle for a power feed conversion.
I would like to help him out and restore the full functionality however.

This machine is used in a heavy metal fab shop, lots of cutting, welding and forging. The mill is useful, but not essential.

Paul

[macona]

Have you called milltronics?