automating a coil winder

I have a hand coil winder and would like to automate it. Rather than hijack the electronic leadscrew topic. I thought I would start another.

The ELS solutions are very much over the top for my application and I do not need the high precision. I simply need to drive two motors with speeds that are in a given ratio. I also need to alter the ratio for different thickness wire.

I suppose I just need a very cheap and cheerful "ELS" with no great pretension to accuracy. The cost of the ELS dwarfs the cost of the hand coil winder!

Any suggestions gratefully received!

Andrew.

Hi Andrew,

I posted a build thread here describing a coil winder. As you have the mechanics already you just need a couple of stepper motors and the electronics to drive them. I used an Arduino Uno with a CNC "shield" carrying a couple of DRV8825 stepper driver breakout boards. The Arduino runs GRBL which is a general purpose CNC controller, but it's free and makes life very easy. One can write simple G Code by hand but there's also freeware called Gcoil that will do it for you. For my purposes I load the code on my phone and drive it over Bluetooth from an app called Grbl Controller but you can equally run it from a PC driving via the Arduino serial port. I don't know how much the ELS costs, but you can run GRBL on an Arduino Nano I think, so the total cost of the drivers plus nano is probably ~£30 max.  Then you need a couple of steppers but they don't have to be high spec.

Actually I have the Arduino and stepper drivers in a box that can run either the power X feed and/or a rotary axis on my mill or the winder - somewhere here there's a thread with more details. If this approach is of interest I'm happy to give more details.

John.

Edited By John Haine on 31/08/2021 12:51:55

Andrew,

I built a coil winder similar to what you are after - long, long ago.. - I used two stepper motors, one for the coil and one driving an M8 leadscrew carrying the yoke though which the wire is fed. Unlike screwcutting, this application never requires that you need to unhitch the carriage, or rewind to the thread start to restart. You always wind one direction, N turns, then the carriage reverses laying down the next layer of N turns at the same pitch, so much simpler, and quite different from an ELS - The typical ELS systems doing the rounds will in fact not work for this at all - will not allow the reverse pass layer to be wound..

My winder is so old - made it about 20 years ago Simple LCD with up/dn buttons to set number or turns per layer, number of turns total and wire thickness. I won't offer you my solution... - no Arduino back then and I used an Intel 8051 uP, and wrote the thing in assembler...

Are you arduino and/or software adept?

Joe

ancient pre computer coil winders used a heart cam to do the traversing of the carriage, geared to the winding axis. There was a room full of them making 24V transformers for heating controls at a plant I worked at in the 1980's. The machines were originally built (beautifully and heavily) in the late 1930's and were still going strong in the 1980's. The motors driving them were the only electric parts. The winders were stopped when the mechanical coil counter kicked out a clutch on the motor shaft.

Possibly the simplest way is to use a pair of stepper motors and drivers with a simple hardware control with switch setting of the speed ratio.

Use a master control oscillator directly driving the faster running motor at at an appropriate speed with a divider chain to generate the lower speed for the slower running motor. Decade drivers probably easiest of the non electronics logic person.

Worked a treat for me several times over the years until I dropped out of active electronics maybe 25 - 30 years ago.

Clive