commecial winding gear tech question

[murrayatuptown]

Hi:

Not necessarily a pickup winding focal point, maybe more appropriate to transformers, but I'm wondering if anyone is familiar with any conventions for the sensing and wiring needed to interface a commercial traverse to a winder that wasn't sold paired with it.

Specifically the Adams Maxwell 1250 or 1260 models. Tonebender looked in his 1201 spindle winder manual for me and they say nothing more than that the accessory is available. I could buy a manual for one to find out if it has that info, but that seemed like a pretty stupid first or second resort. I've tried inquiring at Adams Maxwell a few times (the 3rd only yesterday, so should be patient, but the first two were dead ends.)

I imagine there must be either a standard encoder, or the programming panel allows one to configure the traverse for whatever is convention on one's 3rd party winder...it seems reasonable to me for commercial winding machines to provide such electrical signals...it would make their machines a whole lot easier to hook up. It would surprise me if a feature-rich traverse like the A-M 1250 or 1260 is proprietarily bound to only their winding machines, or a custom interface. I will power it up and try to get some intelligence other than 'error! error!' from the traverse controller display, if it'll even start up with no sensors, or open it if I have to...but there must be someone somewhere on the planet who's been there, done that and is willing to discuss it.

I have a second unrelated question, so I guess I'll post that separately.


Thank you.

Murray

[David King]

Murray, there are many ways to link up the winder spindle to the traverse. Mechanically via gears or cogged pulleys, electro-mechanically via sensors, (Hall, optical, etc). Whatever triggers the traverse must be outputting some sort of square wave, it can't be too hard to inject a signal generator (freeware on PC and mac) into your traverse via the sound card and see if you can get an appropriate response out of it.

If you need very close correlations between the two you might want to look up something called the Electronic Lead Screw or ELS. It's an open source kit that gives you standalone programability for jogging a leadscrew on a small lathe with a stepper motor and keeping it perfectly synchronous with the spindle. There's a long standing group on Yahoo that's moderated by the inventor/developer too.
Electronic Lead Screw Main Page

[murrayatuptown]

Thank you for the lead...it sounds like it will be interesting for some other project ideas as well.

The thing about the particular machine I have, is that the winders sold my the company 'accessorize' with the traverse, and the traverse has a programming interface. I haven't plugged it in and turned it on yet for a couple reasons - 1) I can't reach it where it's stored at the moment and 2) I am still trying to learn as much as possible about its interface before I turn it on and find out if it's supposed to have something connected first...just a general safety thought...motorized equipment...

I suspect most of the concern is not relevant...it probably HAS limits wired and programmed into it, and without any signal from the winder, it'll probably assume the winder is not turning!

It looks for turns and direction info...to me that suggests a quadrature encoder on the winder and a program step in the traverse controller to select the installed winder encoder's resolution that = 1 turn.

From the traverse's feature description, it sounds like multiple stops and sequences can be programmed...like maybe for segmented windings. This suggests some thought about whether the encoder needs an index pulse or not... I'm leaning toward assuming 'no'.

I don't know if encoder signals are standardized as to voltage (0-5 V?) or 'polarity' (high or low).

There are probably countless possibilities. As you suggest, building one's own allows all that to be decided...but I have the blessing and curse of knowing there is alot of brainpower already built into the machine...and no idea how to communicate with it.

I have located someone locally who knows someone who has worked with this particular machine, but is on vacation for 2 weeks. I'll keep reading and hope this guy remembers everything!

[David King]

Lane Poor had an Adams Maxwell winder. I wonder if he remembers anything about it.