Bridgeport Series 1 Anilam GXM retrofit

The "In" button is part of a compressed air operated draw bar setup that mounted on the left side of the mill. The pictures makes the "In" button look like it is mounted on the top of the Z drive housing, just an optical illusion. Really nice when changing collets!

As for the "light"??? Are you talking about the Sem servo on the left side of the Z drive housing?

John, heres a pictures of the oiler. I think the odd ticking sound is the oiler running. I left eh mill powered up for a couple of days and notices there was oil on the ways which wasn't there before.

I've also attached a recording of the sound and it sure does sound like a clock mechanism.

What do you think?

Now that I've got the scales and encoders wired up and working, I'm onto wiring up the servo drives. I have servo dynamics sd1525-10-42 cards.

Currently I manually enable the drives with a momentary push button switch so I don't need to use the ENAx+ or ENAx- pins. So all I need are the GND and AOUTn signals. I wired up my X axis servo card. To check my work, I make sure that I hadn't done any cross wiring by using an ohm meter to check continuity between the 7i77 and the sd1525 cards.

I happened to check the continuity between the GND and AOUT0 signals on the 7i77 card and found a short. This is not what I expected. So I pulled the pluggable terminal off of the 7i77 and measured resistance between pin3 and pin4 of TB5 (thats the GND and AOUT0 pins) and verified that I still get a short.

Now this doesn't seem correct to me. I also tested across the GND and AOUT pins on the other 5 axis with the same results, effectively a short. I guess its possibly that the DtoA chip that drives these pins has a very low resistance between these signals but I'd like to be certain before I power things up.

1) can someone (John??) with a 7i77 card ohm out the same pins and verify what I'm seeing?
2) I'd appreciate any suggestions or inputs here to tell me if I'm doing something wrong here.

PS: I'm curious what all of the signal pins on the sd1525 card are. Can someone point me to the pinouts and signal descriptions for the SD1525?

The outputs are driven with an OPAMP, depending on the whether its powered or not you may read a low resistance to ground (as the outputs are at 0V = gnd)

Peter, thanks for the clarification.

Haven't had much time to work on the integration but I did get this in the mail today. Has anyone got it working with LinuxCNC?

what information comes with the pendant ? any linux driver source or is it just meant as i understand for use with mach3 and it's plugin dll
reason i ask is , i'm interested but cannot find any further information .

There isn't much that comes with it but I really wasn't expecting. anything anyways. I spoke with one vendor but that discussion was very unsatisfying. They said it works with Mach and thats it, no docs whatsoever.

I spent some time on Mach's support forum but that was of little help.

So having worked with usb devices before I decided to go ahead and purchase a unit. From past experiences have shown that usb manufacturers will take the path of least effort when developing drivers.

So last night when it arrived, I plugged it into my windoze box and was pleasantly surprised when it enumerated as a hid device, yeah!

Without documentation Im going to have capture usb packets going to/from the device.

Next I installed usbsnoopy (from sourceforge) on windoze and captured the packets sent from the device when I pressed each button, turned the axis selection knob and turned the axis movement knob. Pretty straight forward. packet values.

Next I need to install Mach and then capture the packets sent to the device which updates the screen.

Then the last part is to figure out how integrate what I learn into LinuxCNC. This last part is where I will need some help as I'm new to LINUXCNC.

Made some progress this week. I'm able to read all the key clicks, the axis selection switch and the dial. But writing to the LCD has posed a problem, not sure what the issue.

Regarding integration with LinuxCNC... since I'm still a relative newb, what would be the best way to inject the key clicks into LinxuxCNC as well as what information do we need to write to the LCD?

Also, I'd like to post some videos showing my success so far. If I attach an AVI file to a post will it "run" in this page? Or is it better to post a link to youtube?