Session 06 – The Ruida Controller In Brief

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The Concise RDWorks Learning Lab with Russ Sadler. Session 6: The Controller in Brief.

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OK, now we’re going to make a start on the controller. Now, what you see in front of you is basically the circuit diagram for the whole machine.

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But this big white block down the bottom right hand corner is the brains of the machine.

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Now, I’m going to call it a black box, even though it’s white, because what goes on inside there does not really concern us.

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There is a microprocessor in there and some fairly powerful programing, but,

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all we’re interested in is what goes in and what comes out.

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So let’s take a quick look around it and try and make some sense of it.

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Now, this top row of terminals is all to do with the outputs from the controller.

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The outputs that are actually controlling the machine and its motions.

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If we take a look at where these wires go to, you’ll see that some of these go to the motor driver X and the motor X, the driver Y and the motor Y.

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Well, let’s take a look along here and we shall see that we’ve got an x axis driver, a Y axis driver,

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a Z axis driver, which you probably won’t have because that’s for pushing the table up and down.

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You’ll only have this Z axis if you’ve got an auto focusing system built into your machine.

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Now, the next axis is called U, and basically it’s an uncommitted control system which allows you to drive a stepper motor,

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to activate a conveyor, to run your rotary system to do anything extra that you want

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with the machine. It’s just a spare output.

Transcript for the Ruida Controller In Brief (Cont…)

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Now, the next two are exactly the same as each other. CN5 is the one that you’ll find used on your machine.

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And only if you have a second later tube in your machine will you be using CN6.

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But CN5 is probably the most important connection set that you’ve got on your machine.

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And we’ll come onto that in a minute. Now, this other set of terminals along the bottom here,

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CN1 to CN4 are all to do with sensors and switches for telling the controller what’s going on around the machine.

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Now, I’m not going to get too involved with those at this point in time.

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Some of those will come into play later on when we talk about other things.

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Now, this row of LED’s across the top here have got numbers beside each LED, but they haven’t got any legend.

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Well, that’s because you can easily miss what these LEDs are, because right down the center of the box,

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there are a set of legends here which are numbered one to 15, which tells you exactly what these LEDs do.

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Now, when you first turn your machine on, the X and Y axis will run to one corner of the machine.

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It could be the left back. It could be the right back. But whatever happens if you take a look down here at CN4.

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You’ll find that there are some limit Switches on here and what will actually happen is those limit switches

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will be made, so that the machine knows where it’s zero zero point is for programing.

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And what will happen is, if you watch these LED’s, one, two, three and four,

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two of those will illuminate for a short period of time and then go out.

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And when they’ve both gone out, you’ll find that LED 14 flashes.

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That basically means that the machine is set and is ready to run.

Transcript for the Ruida Controller In Brief (Cont…)

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Now, I say that because several people have asked me and worried about the flashing LED 14.

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If we take a look at the top left hand corner there, we should see that the main’s comes into a filter.

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Now, that mains goes to three places around the machine, which are all red boxed for you.

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One of them is the 24 volt power supply. If you follow the wires through, that’s the power that goes and runs the controller.

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Now, the other place that the mains goes to is the laser power, high voltage power supply itself,

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because we need the alternating supply inside the power supply to generate incredibly high voltages.

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Basically, just like you do on your spark plug for your car, in a slightly more sophisticated manner.

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But that’s why we need the AC voltage into the power supply.

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Now, the other place that we’ve got the mains going to is into this DC 36 volts power supply,

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which basically supplies DC power to drive the stepper motors.

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So as you can see already with just a few simple descriptions, we’ve covered most of this circuit diagram. Now just down here,

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we’ve got the keyboard, which allows us to put a manual input into the brain,

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and over here we have a laptop or a computer which will connect somehow to the machine.

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Now, there are three ways that you can connect to the machine and get your programs from the computer into the brain.

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One of them is via a local area network an Ethernet system. One of them is via a direct link between the computer and the USB input.

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Now there is a third way and basically that is to use the PC to load the program onto a memory stick and you then plug that memory

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stick into the brain and offload the program that way.

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So there are three separate ways that you can get a program into the controller.

Transcript for the Ruida Controller In Brief (Cont…)

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Now, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, there are two vital connections out of CN5 that connect up to the Laser power supply.

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Now we’ve got the blue line here, that controls the later tube switching on and off.

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Now, if we look at the red line, you’ll see that it comes from a terminal which is marked up PWM.

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Now, we’re not going to explain that.

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We’re not really going to bother with it too much, except to say that it is an alternating signal which is generated by the controller,

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which varies according to the signal voltage that it wants to send out to the laser power supply.

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Now, the laser power supply has got an in-terminal and at that in-terminal, there is a little network which decodes that signal.

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Now, you’ll notice that beside that in-terminal, we’ve already got a five volt, but that’s a five volt output, not a five volt input.

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Now, on some of these controllers, if we look at Terminal one, on CN5 in this particular instance, it’s shown as a ground line.

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But on some controllers, that is actually an analog output.

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They do not use an encoded PWM signal for sending that information to the power supply.

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They use a direct analog naught to five volt signal to send it to the power supply via the same in-terminal.

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So there are two ways you can get a power demand signal into the laser power supply.

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Now, that power supply demand signal, which is naught to five volts.

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If you remember when we talked about the power supply,

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the power supply can deliver a maximum number of milliamps depending on the tube that it’s trying to control.

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We’re not actually controlling the power watts of the laser.

Transcript for the Ruida Controller In Brief (Cont…)

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What we’re doing that we’re controlling the current that flows through the tube.

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Now, these are the only two signal lines between the controller and the laser tube.

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And there are all sorts of wonderful tricks that you can play with these two lines,

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but we’ll come on to those tricks later on when we talk about various features of the machine.