Cheapest used brushless servo combo

[ezalys]

Hey all,

Suppose I'm building a small piece of industrial automation equipment... a PnP, coil winder, CNC, something, and I've decided I definitely want to use brushless AC servos in the 250 W range. I also have decided that I'm okay with closing the position loop external to the servo amplifier using linuxcnc or something... though if I can go cheaper using position control, I'm fine with that, too! What's the cheapest servo drive and motor combo that I can find used that won't give me a headache? There's these yaskawa SGDA amps I've seen, but I'm not sure what motor to pair them with. I've also seen the panasonic MINAS line, but those seem quite expensive. What would those in-the-know suggest?

E

[marchtmdsmiling]

Odrive with standard hobby brushless motors.  You can get everything to test out the system at https://odriverobotics.com/

[ezalys]

My suspicion is that you could go cheaper than odrive if you buy used.

[NiHaoMike]

What about an electric power steering motor?

[bill_c]

I have used a few of these http://www.dmm-tech.com/ but they may not meet your "no headache" requirement.
They work, but not exactly as I had expected.  I tried a project sending serial commands. I could send it to an absolute position but the "disable drive" would reset the current absolute position to zero.  Using the jog or incremental move would also reset the absolute position.  You may be ok if using another device to close the loop though, think it has encoder out and pulse/dir + analog in (may want to check that though).

[tpowell1830]

Depends what you mean by "giving you a headache". You should be able to find an old CNC machine from the '80s or '90s that has a complete setup for 3 or more axis for scrap prices in some case that still actually run. You could strip out the parts that you want and sell the rest at scrap metal prices. The old servos usually had good documentation, if you find a popular (worn out) CNC machine.

Hope this helps...

[CatalinaWOW]

Depends what you mean by "giving you a headache". You should be able to find an old CNC machine from the '80s or '90s that has a complete setup for 3 or more axis for scrap prices in some case that still actually run. You could strip out the parts that you want and sell the rest at scrap metal prices. The old servos usually had good documentation, if you find a popular (worn out) CNC machine.

Hope this helps...

With enough looking you should be able to find a deal.  My son found a four axis machine for sale for next to nothing.  Stripped it down and sold the nearly two tons of metal for scrap (since it wasn't perfectly sorted by metal he got the insanely low mixed metal price).  And offered the perfectly good servos that he didn't need (with controllers) at like 5% of list with no interest whatsoever.  He may still have them.  PM me with an email address if you want to follow up.  I'll pass your interest along to him.  They won't be cheap since shipping to anywhere other than the city he lives in will get pricey, but they are a good deal.

[Doctorandus_P]

Cheap, second hand, and "no headaches"  is a combination that does not go well together.