Interfacing Chuo Seiki stages
I finally got a chance to setup the Chuo Seiki motorized stages I bought at auction a while back. The stages use oriental motor 5 phase stepper motors (PH533s). Of course, being second hand they didn’t come with any drivers, and stepper 5-phase drivers are far less common than 2-phase ones.
I picked up an oriental motor UDK5214NW 5-phase driver. Looking at the stage it seemed that only 5 wires went to the stepper, the rest go to limit switches (I assume optical). 5 wires doesn’t seem to match with the PH533 datasheet, and the colors didn’t match those shown on the driver but I tried wiring it up anyway (I assume it uses the wiring shown below).
The most painful part of the whole process is obtaining the connectors. The stage uses HR10A-10P-12S (Hirose) connectors which cost about 20USD each. The stepper driver uses a CN1 connector which also costs about 15USD. So for an XYZ stage you’re spending 100+USD on connectors alone. It would in fact be straight forward to hack the Hirose connectors off and stick D-type connectors on but I didn’t want to mess up the stages.
Pins 1 to 5 on the HR10A appear to go to the motor. I wired these through to the stepper driver ignoring the color coding on the driver. Somewhat surprisingly this worked.
Pins 1 and 2 rotate clockwise, 3 and 4 anti-clockwise. The inputs are opto-isolated, and require a ground and signal connection.
I tried the following stages: ALV-600-H1M, ALS-602-HOM and MMU-60X-H1. They all appear to have the same pinout.
Using a 100Hz pulse it took approximately 10s to move 1mm, which sits well with the stated 1 micron resolution of these stages.
Misc. Pictures: