Any chips on the control panel, especially directly on the keyboard or one the
keyboard is connected to via a multi-wire cable? Somewhere in there may be a
matrix encoder and RS232C chip. If you have RS232C then it should be possible
to tap into that to feed character data into a modern control computer. I was
thinking about doing that on a knee mill with an old Anilam system. The
membrane keyboard connected to a little board with a matrix encoder and RS232C
chip. From there it was a serial connection to the system in the big box.
Should've been possible to feed that data into LCNC. But I sold the panel to
someone repairing a same model Anilam control.
On Saturday, February 2, 2019, 3:49:03 PM MST, Thaddeus Waldner
<thadw...@gmail.com> wrote:
The engraver/router that I am retrofitting is for use at the school where I
teach. The big idea is to provide students with an opportunity to learn about
industrial CNC control without spending too much money up front also down the
road in the case of the inevitable crash.
The original controller ran off a printer driver of sorts, and was not really
suitable for anything 3d and didn’t run G-Code. Using a Mesa 7i96 + 7i73 I was
able to (hope to be able to) take care of the I/O hardware for well under $200,
which is nothing short of amazing in my opinion. I bought the 7i73 before
mapping out the key wiring on the original control panel, thinking that since
it’s only 22 keys and 11 wires coming out of the unit, it should work. Turns
out I was wrong, but …
With any approach, I needed to make some sort of patch cable or board to
connect the existing control panel up to the the MESA card, and adding some
buffers to that card is simple enough. The other issue with the 7i73 is that
the outputs with their rating of just 4mw are not really suitable for running
display LEDs. The latch circuit takes care of that issue as well. I will
document it once I have it working.
Your idea of a pendent that generates g-code is an interesting one. I am
running NativeCAM on this machine.
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