A while ago I mentioned this Troyke CNC rotary table that I bought off ebay.
When I received it and applied power to the motor (30v, no more than
5A limited power supply) it would not budge. Called Troyke, they have NOTHING on it.I set it aside and continued to work on my CNC mill.
Now that I have only a few odds and ends to do on the mill, like buttons and switches. They are complicated due to HALUI etc, so I wanted to do soemthing easy. I looked at the table again.
I took the motor off. Without the table, the motor spun happily.
I stuck a bar into the table's motor connection (star type plastic force transmitter thingy) and tried to turn the table. After a little effort with a wrench, it moved. I found one more screw that might (not sure) have stopped the table, backed it out, and in any case, after a little while of rocking around the table felt much easier to move. It might have sat for 10 years or whatever and just got all stuck.
Put the motor back and again, the motor would not move it. At this point I realized that 5A is just not enough to get it going.
I called in in heavy artillery (military battery charger going up to
20A, 150V). Set it to 30 volts. When connected to that, the motor MOVED, and kept going.More voltage, more speed. I kept it running for a while (20 minutes or so). The running amps were approximately 3 amps. From that, the motor became warm, but barely, had a body level temperature.
I explain this by assuming that the screw is preloaded or some such, and is hard to turn because Troyke tried to eliminate backlash.
What I know at this point is that it is a DC servo driven table and it works.
What I do not know is what is the operating voltage of this table. How would I find out? I am thinking, to take the motor out again (or take the rear encoder cover), and increase voltage until I get approximately 2,000 RPM from the motor. That should be appx. the max voltage. I do not really care with this table, to get max speed from it, as rotary tables do not often need to turn fast. I just do not want to go beyond the parameters of the motor.
My second question is how do I decipher encoder wires. I will make a separate post about it.