Help needed with new/old project.

[hayabusa]

Hi. All.

What i have is a bit of a dilemma that hopefully some kind sole can set me straight on.

First I must give the details of the machine, then i will detail the dilemma for your consideration, with a little luck I will finally get a good nights sleep knowing what direct to take.

I have an old 3 axis router built in the early 90s, it has a parker digiplan rack with various slot in cards on the upper level and three cd30 stepper drives on the lower level. The machine was nurtured into life soon after power up. With a few programs already on disc one was loaded and ran to test the machines functions. To cut a long story short the program was in error causing the z axis to step lower and lower until it connected with the deck. During the extensive fault finding operation one of the cards developed a real fault. (Real time clock error, real time clock inoperable)

I managed to track down a used control cabinet hoping to make one good one from the pair only to find the boards used where different and one was missing.

Dilemma?
Do I try to get the old board repaired or try to update to a modern pc/Mach3/ and interface them with the cd30 drives. cd30 drives use 24v step/direction.

Any push in the right direction would be a big help.

[jeffs555]

If it were mine, I would try to get it connected to a PC with Mach3. I am not familiar with it, but looked briefly at this manual. http://www.parkermotion.com/manuals/cd/CD20-30.pdf

On page 13, it shows a 25 pin connector on the CD drive motherboard that has TTL level opto-isolated inputs, that could probably be driven from a printer port or breakout board. On page 34 it shows this connector and an auxiliary connector, but only the aux connector is spec'd to have 24volt logic.

[hayabusa]

Thanks Jeff.
I've looked at the PDF file and it looks as though my motherboard is different to the one shown. I think mine could be an early version or perhaps a customer specification board.
I will try to identify the board and see if supports the required TTL input and post back.
Many thanks