A crossroads - what to do with my ancient cnc control?

[Jim Shaper]

I recently bought a Milltronics Partner 1 with centurion 5 controller. It's a 1D model which places it somewhere around 1990.

The control works, but it's awfully slow and the memory is severely lacking which requires drip feed via DNC for anything complicated.

Milltronics will upgrade my box with the latest control for $1600 and this is something I could do in a day or so, as they're local. Drive down, drop it off, go have some lunch, come pick it up and write a check.

There's other options like the CNC brain for $500, but then I'm not sure if my same servo amps would work with it or how long it would take me to get it running once the conversion was under way. The potential variable expenses could easily push this beyond the $1600 fixed cost of the factory retrofit.

Anyone have any insights as to what I should do to get this machine up to date?

[Jim Shaper]

http://www.demaagd.com/compmod/cent.html

This is another interesting solution, but I'm not sure how to port the software over for the newer hardware. I've emailed him a couple questions, but it's been a while since he's updated any of the pages and I don't know what my chances of a response are.

Porting the I/O card and anything else needed to interface with the servo amps and such to a modern PC would be great.

[macona]

Skip the CNC Brain. Its mostly vaporware.

is the upgrade to a Cent 6?

Get the new Centurion upgrade. We had a mill with a Cent 6 on it and it was really nice. Great conversational. The guy that owns it used to work for Milltronics. A real control beats anything else hands down.

[Jim Shaper]

It would be a 7 I believe. I haven't talked to them about it yet.

The other option I'm seeing is porting all the old cards over to a new host running XP via ISA to USB adapters. I just don't know how the GUI would work if I did that.

$1600 is a big pill to swallow right now. Mainly I'd just like to speed it up and expand the memory a bit. Also being able to run wifi to it for data transfer would be sweet. I'm not so interested in generating CAD/CAM files on it or internet or any of that.

[macona]

I would jump on a Cent 7 for that price. But I really think it is going to be a Cent 6 which is still a real nice control. The Cent 6 has the control box in the back cabinet of the mill where the Cent 7 has the entire computer in the front panel behind the LCD. The Cent 7 communicates with the IO unit through a fiber-optic cable. A lot of rewiring would be involves. With a Cent 6 I think it would just be a swap of the boxes.

Dont try to hack something. Its just not worth it. Use it like it is till you get the money to do it right.

[Jim Shaper]

I talked to a friend of mine who's more familiar with it, and basically it's the same turd with a different software package and the same archaic hardware limitations of the 486. They give you a new processor, but you retain all your original cards.

I'm thinking of doing a Pentium 1 port, but I'll get the machine going on this hardware first. It's basically dos 3.1 run from SIMM cards.

I managed to borrow a video card and got the screen issue resolve, but I'm still getting a ground fault error on my servo amps. I think the bridge rectifier died when the power cap went, but I haven't verified that yet.

[fasto]

Looking through my junk box (er, junk boxes, er way too many junk boxes) for something this evening, and I found:
The factory radio from my 1993 VW (which I replaced 3 days after getting the car new). Now, I can say it's in "showroom condition".
A huge 6" muffin fan, nos, made in 1988, which I'm going to use as an additional fan on my VMC's servo drive. It will fit right in, my VMC was made in 1989.

And, whay you're probably more interested in,
a supply of ISA bus motherboards (1 386SX, 1 386DX with 387, 1 486DX) and not one, not two, but three ISA VGA cards! Two are old enough to have switchable VGA/EGA on them. One 8-bit, two 16-bit.

If you'd like one for shipping costs, drop me a PM.

Oh, I did not find what I was looking for, a red laser tube that I have around here, somewhere...
--
Aaron

[Jim Shaper]

Aaron, thanks for the offer, but I've managed to scrounge up a replacement for the spare I'm borrowing, and a spare of my own.

One of them also happened to come in a fully functional 486dx-66 wrapper and also had a couple pretty high end rotary motion control cards which are now on fleabay.


I also verified that my bridge rectifier is functioning just fine, but I might have a wiring short in the motor leads which caused the real problem which lead to the discovery of the dead cap. I've gotta do some more checking on the machine tomorrow.

Another development is that I got the milltronics backup disk from the previous owner today, so I'm probably going to try loading it on the 486 (once I find a keyboard adapter ha!) and go from there.

[wmgeorge]

Looking through my junk box (er, junk boxes, er way too many junk boxes) for something this evening, and I found:
The factory radio from my 1993 VW (which I replaced 3 days after getting the car new). Now, I can say it's in "showroom condition".
A huge 6" muffin fan, nos, made in 1988, which I'm going to use as an additional fan on my VMC's servo drive. It will fit right in, my VMC was made in 1989.

And, whay you're probably more interested in,
a supply of ISA bus motherboards (1 386SX, 1 386DX with 387, 1 486DX) and not one, not two, but three ISA VGA cards! Two are old enough to have switchable VGA/EGA on them. One 8-bit, two 16-bit.

If you'd like one for shipping costs, drop me a PM.

Oh, I did not find what I was looking for, a red laser tube that I have around here, somewhere...
--
Aaron

Don't you just hate that? You know you have it, but where is it at? I have spent days looking for something and find it on top of my workbench right where I left it, only behind something I should have moved.

[Jim Shaper]

I did find a short to ground on the motor wiring today. So now I just need to chase down some twisted pair 14ga and get to pulling the old stuff out.

It's nice that it faulted out rather than waiting till the motor leads shorted causing the servo drive to blow. That happened to a friend of mine on the same machine.

I also found the encoder wiring insulation is rock hard due to how the coolant has rotten it. So that'll likely need to go as well.