Replace dead CRT on Southwestern Industries DPM Mill

[jemery13]

Greetings, was following a thread here about replacing old dead CRT's on Haas machines, some of which helped a little but the SWI DPM machine (1996 vintage) was not quite as easy.
Long term solution is to replace the control but $7K is a bit to much to swallow coming out of a slow winter. So I needed a kludge fix to get by. In a nut shell, the DPM uses an old PC chassis with an old MDA (MGA) card and related mono CRT monitor. You can just plug a DB-9M cable into the video card but getting it out of the sealed box would take some hole drilling and such. I decided to map out the pins from the video card all the way to the cable inside the pendant that goes to the CRT unit. I had an old mono MDA monitor I strapped to the top of the pendant. I cut and inserted a DB-9F into that short cable and ran the monitor cable out the back. Works very well, but like I said, as a short term solution. Either upgrade control of find a small MDA monitor to go inside the pendant. So, following is the pin out and colors for altering that short cable inside the pendant:

DB-9 on Cable at MDA Card	Signal	Cable to CRT
Pin 1 Black	ground	Pin A Black
Pin 7 White	video	Pin J Green
Pin 8 Red	horiz synch	Pin F Blue
Pin 9 Green	vert synch	Pin K Brown

So, in other words, cut the 4 wires shown on the edge connector cable (A, J, F and K) and solder them to the pins shown on a DB-9F connector (1, 7, 8 and 9).
Then you can plug any MDA monitor into that connector.

Hope this helps, I know I'm not the only one running vintage SWI machines with monitor troubles.
On another note, would be nice to see an SWI specific group here.

je

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[vegipete]

Hah, your mill monitor setup looks almost exactly like ours, although we don't have the extra box in the middle.

When our monitor failed a bunch of years ago, I found an alternate solution. I grabbed an old VGA card from our "haven't-tossed-it-out-yet-pile" and was able to slot it into the motherboard in the case on the back of the mill. It was a tight fit but it went in. The old PC in there just turned on and worked fine with the video card, no settings changes or adjustments of any kind were necessary. The cable snaked out somewhere and now a VGA monitor is strapped on top of the old keypad/monitor box. The remarkable thing is that the image is in colour! For example, the flashing bar when you are in jog mode is actually red.

[jemery13]

Did you leave the old mono card in there, or put the VGA one in it's place?

[vegipete]

I couldn't remember so I just went and checked.

Does this look familiar?


Here's the (not super clear) view in the CPU cabinet on the back:


Looks like I just added the VGA card to one of the open PCI slots and I didn't touch the old video card at all. The VGA cable makes a sharp bend under the card and comes up on the left of the image - the curved black cable that just obscures the corner of the red printing on the power supply label. I can't see in to check the VGA card type but it's an ancient sucker.

I snaked the cable out the floppy drive hatch.