Adding a temporary rotary axis to a 5-Axis machine

[MattBlight]

G'day,

We have a job that requires a bit of mill-turn type work, and have setup a special rotisserie for the job to mount on our 5-axis machine's bed.

The issue is driving the rotisserie...

The 5-axis is running Analog servo drives through a Kanalog board. But we have a stepper motor and driver available to use for this task.

Can I multiplex the Step/Dir signals to JP4/6 on the KFLOP and still use the Analog servos through the Kanalog?

If i can do this, do I then run the rotisserie as the 'A' axis? And if I do this will it then affect the operation of the RTCP that I have setup for the existing 5 axes? I was somewhat hoping to be able to just have the machine operate as it currently does, but be able to tell the rotisserie to rotate independently, but be able to accurately set it to certain angles to perform some nominally 3-axis operations on specific planes. ie. I don't want the rotation of the A axis to affect the X,Y,Z coords, but simply have an A axis angle.

The other option is to just have an external driver using an Arduino, and to just completely independently set the thing to rotate at a set speed then drag the tool across it using the 5-axis, but this makes it harder for indexing things.

[TomKerekes]

Hi MattBlight,

Can I multiplex the Step/Dir signals to JP4/6 on the KFLOP and still use the Analog servos through the Kanalog?

Yes

If i can do this, do I then run the rotisserie as the 'A' axis? And if I do this will it then affect the operation of the RTCP that I have setup for the existing 5 axes?

This depends on the Kinematics formulas that you are using. The Kinematics5AxisTableBC.cpp does not do anything with the angle A so I believe it will work as you desire.

[MattBlight]

Excellent, thanks Tom.
I will be attempting to run something today!
Cheers,
Matt