Converting a Brother TC215 to LinuxCNC

Hello everyone,

I’ve been lucky enough to be the recipient of a Brother TC215 midway through a LinuxCNC conversion. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at CNC work, as I’ve done a little bit of manual milling and a lot of fabrication work over the years, and I’m always curious to learn and build new things. It’s been a pretty steep learning curve, as I’m new to basically all of this, but I’ve leaned a lot via search and previous forum threads and I think I’m at the point where starting a thread is worthwhile. 

On the hardware side: 

• Mill is a Brother TC215
• Dyn4 AC Servo Drivers/motors
• Mesa 7i92 / 7i76 / 7i77D control boards
• HP Elite 8300 USDT running LinuxCNC / ProbeBasic

I'm currently planning on running some of the older Brother boards for things like coolant, safety switches, limit switches, etc, just to keep things simple for now, as I already have breakout boards for all the connectors. I can clean everything up later if it gets that far.  My friend validated that the mill’s mechanical functions are in good shape and made it about halfway through the wiring - but my current priority is to wire everything up such that I can get XYZ servo movement first, and then I will add additional functionality. So I’ll try and keep this thread focused on the help I need to get things moving under their own power. 

What I’ve got so far is: The hardware is mounted in the mill, I roughly understand how things are laid out. I feel like i have a broad sense of how this should go together, but the details are oftentimes a little more opaque than I’d like.  What I’ll be doing when I have a minute :

1. Test all my servo controllers and drives (easy to do, just need to get my windows laptop out to the mill)
2. Power up the Mesa board (pretty easy, just need to spend some time looking at all the wiring and make sure I don’t fry anything)

The thing that’s blocking me right now is that I don’t really know enough to confirm that I’m wiring the servo drivers in a reasonable way. My understanding is: I should be able to wire my X / Y / Z servos in the following way, to do analog +10v control as a simple starting point. I need to set it up so I’m wiring: 

• 7i77D +24v from field power to Dyn4 JP4-15 (Servo Enable) 
• 7i77D TB5 (Analog Drive Interface) To Dyn4 JP4-13 (Analog +10v) & JP4-25 (Analog GND)
• 7i77D TB3 (Encoder 0-2) to Dyn4 JP5-2 through 8 (Encoder outputs)

My plan was to disconnect all the motors from the mill and test them on the bench, but running through LinuxCNC, so I can confirm my understanding on how LinuxCNC operates. Once the motors are confirmed to work on the bench, then I would start on wiring up the Estop, limit switches, and other things I would need to get the mill safely moving, and then follow that with wiring in the spindle.


Here's a picture of how things it sits:


Any and all feedback appreciated, as well as suggestions about if I should approach this another way. I've learned a lot here and I hope that documenting this in the long run helps someone else