Hello,
I am a researcher working on building a paste 3D printer to enable research in nonplanar printing of paster materials in our lab. I have decided to use a UR10 robot in our lab that currently is under utilized. For this purpose I am retrofitting a mechanical paste extruder which I previously built.
I am new to the UR platform and currently very unclear about integration of external motors. For my paste extruder and auger system I need to control 3 stepper motors. Let’s just focus on the main motor that rams the material in the extruder. I was thinking of using this NEMA23 closed loop stepper motor which costs around $140CAD for the motor and stepper controller together.
However, after reading a few forum posts here about stepper motor integration, it seems I was wrong thinking this would be easy, and I should probably look at other types of motors for my application. Just searching for Modbus tcp stepper motor I can’t seem to find something comparable to what I had in mind.
I was wondering if you had recommendations on reasonably priced motors that would integrate well with UR platform, or if there are any tutorials or guid that I may have missed for someone just starting out with UR robots and 3rd party motors. I would imagine this is a very common problem as I see people building rotary tables, linear guides, etc. I would appreciate any clarity on this topic.
The only time I’ve used stepper motors was with a PLC. It was wired rather than communications.
The controller required 5v rather than 24v, so I used opto-couplers with a 5v PSU to control the controller. The controller required pulses to be sent to it from the PLC to determine the speed / movement of the motor, it’s quite a fast pulse I used so the question would be, can the UR output pulses at a fast enough speed. I don’t know the answer to this unfortunately.
Would you say you had a successful integration and would you recommend going down that route to connect a bunch of stepper motors?
Right now I am looking at using Modbus but I am running into some problems with a basic Modbus test setup. Modbus looks attractive in my case because each unit is independent. I am hoping to use Arduino platform to control each stepper motor once I figure out basics of Modbus communication.
Honestly I was hoping there would be straightforward tutorials somewhere for basic integration of common things such as stepper motors. If anyone has information to help me make some progress on this I appreciate it!
It worked well with the PLC (Siemens S7-1200), if you can find a signal conditioner to convert the analog output from the UR to pulses then you could control the stepper motor controller that way, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. Or you could use a S7-1200 to do it, but you would need the Siemens software (TIA Portal).
I’ve never used Modbus so can’t comment on it.
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