Serial absolute encoders

have a motoman sk150 the encoders can send out there position from home as a rs-232, they also give a standard incremental output. is there a way to on power on read 6 serial ports and feed the position in to the current position? the best thing would to be reading the com ports real time but there seem to be problems with this

Do these use the Yaskawa protocol? (quadrature A pin is serial ASCII at 9600 baud at startup)
I have been considering supporting this

yes but they have what they call Phase S also and it is a 1 way rs422 that you can read with pin 2 and 5 on a standard serial port

looks like i need to rebuild a motor on this arm, but what would you need to support this? i have a spec sheet and a few working encoders(5 so far)

the encoders are labled utmae-b12be5w from Yaskawa. the original drives are CACR-IR44sfb. i don't plan on running them of the original drives as the com info is in Japaneses only.
here is the PDF on the encoders they seem to be type 2. i have connected them to a com ports as shown on
page 10 and used a putty to view the position info and error data. all 6 of the encoders work and 5 out of the 6 motors have been tested and 4 of 6 work with abb microflex drives, but for 3 of the motors this will be to small and no absolute data is read by the drives.

cool i will dig in to this, i see a prolbem though there to small even if i can get one. the 3 big motors are 4.4kW and looks like 2.2kW is as big as it will go.