7i96 Spindle Wiring

Just give us some good pictures of the innards, we can help you figure it out.

That's easy enough!

As requested, I come with photos.

First, the spindle control motor in questions:



Next, the guts of the machine in an approximate recreation of the layout before I gutted it:


The front of the machine with the controls:


The motherboard:



And finally, what I believe to be the spindle controller:

and where the inputs are for it on the back of the machine:


What I cannot tell is how I would interface with it via the Mesa 7i96 card without the rest of the innards. Any and all help is immensely appreciated! If additional photos or details are needed, I'll gladly get them for you.

Dang that is old, there is an Intel 386EX processor in it ! That was 1991 or 2 !
The easiest way, ditch everything, get 3 drives, even the cheap 10 $ ones will do, just avoid TB6450 something something. TB6600 will do, although 90% of claimed TB6600 on the net are not TB6600, they are TB something 109, and they are good, they can do 3 to 3.5A, so plenty for your machine. The spindle controll through an "arduino" relay for 2 to 4$ and that would be it.
Oh, and a PC with parallel port.

tommylight wrote: Dang that is old, there is an Intel 386EX processor in it ! That was 1991 or 2 !
The easiest way, ditch everything, get 3 drives, even the cheap 10 $ ones will do, just avoid TB6560 something something. TB6600 will do, although 90% of claimed TB6600 on the net are not TB6600, they are TB something 109, and they are good, they can do 3 to 3.5A, so plenty for your machine. The spindle controll through an "arduino" relay for 2 to 4$ and that would be it.
Oh, and a PC with parallel port.

How many wires go to the spindle ?

Tommy, you're not far off the mark with the 1991 or 1992, I saw that on the circuit boards in a couple places.

To back up, what you are suggesting is basically what I have done. I kept the mechanics of the machine but upgraded the electrical. I have:
a 32-44V power supply
3 DM542 stepper drivers
and the Mesa 7i96 (so I can connect to it using ethernet because I really wanted to avoid getting a parallel port setup).

The spindle motor has 8 wires coming out of it.

Can you point me in a direction to understand better what you mean by an arduino relay to control the spindle? I like the sound of $2-4 to solve this issue.