Sorry it took so long, i haven't had time to do this yet and wanted to write a proper summary of what i've done. I wanted to keep the original servos and everything else and ended up getting Honda connectors matching the original Fanuc used. My goal here was to make a drop in control board that could be "hot swapped" into any mv-jr without doing any wiring, only as much work as swapping out the original motherboard. i bought the mesa cards i thought i needed and the Honda breakout boards and started mocking up everything on a piece of cardboard. Later I cut out a piece of aluminum, folded the edges for stability and mounted din rails for the electronics. I then started wiring up this, after a very very very long time of finding out how the original control was wired. The original incremental pulscoders and servo drives were also reused. I used mesa analog outputs to reproduce the tach and command signals to the drives.I ended up cleaning the op panel and looked around for touch displays that would fit, and ended up finding a nice display that had great colors and looked great with touch that worked seamlessly with Linuxcnc. I then plasma cut a plate and powder coated it black, this also reused the original mounting holes for the CRT. I also wanted to reuse the original op. panel. So, I decided to do the same in the op panel and pin out every button and light and wired it up to mesa cards and ran one rj45 cable for serial com back to the main board in the control box. I also wanted to create a custom version of probe basic that removed all the buttons I still had and functioned more like the original fanuc cnc, without removing the elegance I also tried recreating every original button used so the entire op panel would be functional, including the key switch, power on, power off also for the pc. This went great and almost all logic was done in ladder, this also included the logic for the tool changer. In the tool changer i also decided to keep all sensors intact and used (this is the same for everything in this retrofit) So during the tool change it checks for, pot up, down, spindle orient, arm pos sensors amongst many more and will need confirmation of all, if not it will fault out. I also tried recreating most of the faults in the original machine-like run-away, low oil, coolant, air pressure, etc. Last i added a picture of my first time milling, this is just a smiley with my name on it, just for nostalgia as my teacher who "did cnc" created one for me a couple of years ago (the shit one) So i wanted to try making the same thing now (the slightly less shit one)
I’ve probably forgot to mention half of the interesting stuff, i can also share alot more pictures if anyone's interrested, so any questions just ask!I hope this makes sense and is readable, writing easy to read text really isn't my strongest area. Feedback would be great!