Hi,

Ok so I am trying to make a pitching machine, I acquired a Treadmill Controller + Motor (1.5hp 220Vdc) from a Apollo Air06 Treadmill.

Here is a link of a picture the motor controller.

Here is the same motor controller with annotations of the ports.

When buying the controller I tested the controller using a console (Digital Console Speed Levels 1-16) of the treadmill and observing the PWM( - PIN di - ) signal on an oscilloscope (Freq. 16.76kHz Duty cycle( varied from 94% to 25% for various speed levels on the console) ). I dont have the console any more, as it was of the person from whom I bought the controller.

Ok so I know the controller works, Now I have an arduino generating the same PWM waveform feeding it through an opto-coupler to the controller (to make the 5V PWM of the Arduino to a 12V PWM wave that the controller would accept). But I am getting no output (i.e. My motor isnt running) , only the incline UP relay keeps switching from time to time. Although the connect led on the board lights up.

I know that I am providing the PWM on the correct pin of the board, because of the four wires two are Power (12V and GND) the Other I traced by checking the two optocopulers the (di) is the one on the input of a optocopuler and the other (do) is on the output of the other optocopuler. As higlighted on the image.

Any thoughts on what I could be doing wrong ?

 

Is there an enable signal for the control board? Most have an enable for the E-Stop function

 

You need to find out what the Do / Di pins were doing when the board was connected to the treadmill , then you would see if it needed an Start signal.

Whats the motor encoder for, speed control feedback?

 

Hi there....I looked at the pics and I know what is going on here, I think. Those Di and Do are DATA IN and DATA OUT. This control board is not an analog drive board is it.? Did the original console provide a PWM signal or "data bursts" as in Serial Communications from the upper board. This is a fairly new technique of drive control...but I think they will go back to the simpler analog PWM one day soon.

 

Oh....that encoder is to match motor shaft speed to a sent speed command. Motor shaft speed provides much tighter regulation of the running belt. You may very well need this analog pulse train feedback for the main PWM generator to provide a drive signal. Your main drive signal is coming from the programmed IC and you should find that one Opto drives data into the co.troll board and one Opto drives the Data Out signal. I made a similar pulse generator to feed back on a Horizon control board.