EZTrack DX Series 2 Motherboard upgrade.

[Knausscpa]

Greetings all!

I do the IT work for an engineering company that has an EZTrack Series 2 DX CNC machine. I am getting a controller board failure but what is currently loaded is very old and they talked about upgrading the software before this happened. We saw this as a good opportunity to make the upgrade while doing the repair. My question is this... the company they purchased the machine from in Los Angeles wants the following:

Motherboard upgrade: 784.00
Disk on Module: 165.00
Software Recovery: 149.00
Filter: 46.00
Plus another ~700 for the install.

This seems pretty steep for a 486 or pentium I motherboard and their other items. Is there an alternate kit that someone can suggest. They use Mastercam i believe for drawings and then upload them with a USB flash drive to the EZTrack or with floppy ( i can't recall the specifics for this machine I know there is a floppy drive that is accessed externally though )

I took a look inside the machine and it didn't really seem all that complicated. Is there a good software I should suggest? Or best case is there a complete kit that i can get and do the installation myself? Any help would be VERY appreciated.

-Casey

[machintek]

Define controller board.
Bad Nicad battery on the mother board?
Bad axis drive board?
Bad I/O board to the floppy or hard drive?
You are correct in that the original Dx had a 486 mother board.
You could dumpster dive for a replacement but what would go bad next. The BMDC is a slow board and you need a slow mother board to talk to it.
You may have a Cutler Hammer control that already has a half size industrial mother board.
The replacements are purchased from ADVANTECH. They are not cheap.

George

[DF-ENTERPRISES]

Hi there. Try looking at EMI. Thats where I got my mother board upgrade.


http://67.59.141.211/BridgeportQuickList.html

[NC Cams]

Supposedly, the rastest board that can be used to service the BMDC card in a DX is 133 mhz Pentium. However, EMI reportedly has a replacement that works and it does run at a faster clock speed. It may be a bit pricier but at least it SHOULD plug and play.

Don't get oo carried away in trying to soup up the DX - as MACHINETEK says, it is a "slow" DOS based system and it does NOT always play well with the latest and greatest softwares or operating systems. Guys have tried 300 celerons and others of that ilk and the machines may not even boot, let alone run.

There have been folks who've gotten them to run fine with Win 98 and/or 98SE with fast machines - don't know which boards. Yet, there are folks who have had "issues" with DOS 6.22 and legacy boxes - it all seems to be how and if the m/b reacts favorably with the software. They all seem to differ, especially as the later, more highly integrated ones with PCI came about.

IT is too bad that you can't find low cost "legacy" ISA boards to service these older applications. I've got a number of "legacy" systems that have some special high buck data acquisition cards that will prove costly to fix when the M/B's go bad (and they do - one seems to be doing so today).

What used to be 'cheap" ain't necessarily cheap anymroe, especially when it comes to "cheap" desktop PC based equipment. Computers can be such a PITA when it comes to CNC....

[JoaTmon]

Are the motherboards COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) AT motherboards? If so, you could try e-bay or a computer recycler.