Retrofiting Scm record 220

Hello
So this is my first retrofit and I am looking for some guidance. This has a Num 1040 controller and originally had a windows computer with windows 95, the computer died and we tried to upgrade to a newer computer, which was a nightmare with Num saying it must be a Scm problem and scm says it a controller problem, so I am done. I have pretty much decided on some sort of mesa cards but not sure on which ones as there is a seriously a lot of choices. I am thinking pci or pcie , as the computer I have for this is a newer lenevo think centre with rs 232 9 pin connector for the Num controller. Is the express better or just smaller? I also need quite a few I/Os as this router has both an umbrella tool changer and tools that slide out of the z axis head plus vacuum pump, clamps etc. To tune of 84 inputs and 96 out so long as I haven't missed any. It has Yaskawa servo drives CACR_SR looks like standard analog drives with encoders and Bonfiglioli, I never heard of, spindle drive also looks like standard analog drive.I am sure I will have more questions but this is a good start.


Thanks
Jamie

We have a similar vintage SCM except ours is a Routomat. We bought it cheap as a total basket case, that took me about a month to piece it back together. Unfortunately I was (un)lucky enough to revive our machine's NUM 1040 control. We did upgrade it's PC to a newer, but still quite old PC running XP. We did end up calling in a tech from SCM, and the only guy they had who still knew anything about these old systems was from Germany. He found I had a couple of wires for the tool changer stepper wired backwards causing it to turn the wrong way, and offered for free to upgrade the pc from the old Win95 Pentium to what ever XP PC we had laying around, (mostly because he couldn't bear to work on the pathetic old PC).

In hind sight I think maybe we'd have been better off If I had just converted it to Linuxcnc back then. And I would have had we not been able to revive the the original HD to get the machine's parameter backup off of it (since the NUM battery was flat and lost all its parameters.) a few wacks on the table freed the stuck heads in the HD and it worked good/long enough to get a good image of it.

That said, I would have chosen a Mesa 5i25+7i77+7i74+ two or three smart serial cards, I can't remember exactly which ones. I had a shopping list made up once. One of the trickier parts was going to be replacing the optical serial connected remote IO panel mounted on the head, but I think the right smart serial card could do it. (It runs most of the IO for the tool changer and a few other things.)

One of your main questions which is better PCI or PCIe. They are functionally equivalent for this application. If you PC only has PCIe slots get the PCIe if you PC has a PCI slot get that, because it's a few $ cheaper.

I want to mentiont it´s a pain in the ass to buy a new mainboard with PCI.
Most of them are PCIe.
take good care of what you gonna buy.

So You would you replace the remote I/O boards with serial smart cards and run serial cable in place of the optical cables? and do you connect the serial cards through the other mesa card.I assume they used the optical for noise. And then which serial rs 232,422 or 485 I only have experience with rs 232 ,getting old cnc 's to talk to newer usb computers and that's a big pain.And also what about serial to optical converters.

I don't know exactly why the control builders chose it. but I'm guessing speed, reliability,and marketing.
The serial connection I would be using is Mesa's propitiatory Smart Serial interface. Which is a RS422 connection. It is supposed to be good for 100ft runs. you don't need to worry much about connecting them, you just connect the Mesa Smart Serial daughter card to the Smart Serial port on the Mesa card connected to the Mesa FPGA card.
I'm not sure of the layout of your machine, but on ours in the main control cabinet there are 2 large relay output boards and two large input boards (all 24v wired), then out on the spindle head there is one remote optically connected I/O board (16ins/16outs). I'd keep the large boards in the cabinet but connect them through a remote serial card (7i84) and the isolated inputs of the 7i77 card. then run a long Smart Serial cable out to replace the optical panel with a 7i84.

I may actually be starting this conversion after all. The Num 1040 control on our SCM took a crap last week. Depending on the repair estimate (I'm expecting it to come back today) I will be dumping the old control and replacing with Linuxcnc.
(I was told by my managers if the repair is under $5000 we fix it, over $9000 retrofit, and if between, we'll have to discuss it further.)

I have two of those optical 16 I/O boards one on the head for the individual spindles that drop down, seven of them I believe, and then the other on top the gantry running part of the umbrella tool changer and some other stuff plus the the I/O boards in the cabinet 64 input and 48 output so far, still sifting through wiring diagrams. On another I see not all these boards come up in the Pncconf wizard do they have to have custom ini or hal files written?

If your machine is anything like mine, only about 2/3 of the 64/48 io board in the cabinet is actually used.

If you haven't noticed in the wiring diagrams for the machine %I50n.n are inputs on the boards in the cabinet and %I40n.n are the ones on the remote IO. Similarly for the outputs %Q50n.n are the relay boards in the cabinet and %Q40n.n are remote. (I'm not sure how your 2nd remote IO would be addressed, but I'm sure it's similar. And on my machine all of the IO points are listed in the schematic manual including the unused ones, so it isn't too hard to figure out how many points you actually need.

I am pretty sure the remote serial IO cards don't show up in PNCconfig unless they are plugged in and powered up. And then they should show up automatically.

Ok I see that they use %41n.n for the second board. So I have another question about the wire diagrams,maybe a European thing. So a lot of the main power wiring has a number to indicate where they go on the next page but there is / and a number like 9.1 and then the next page is 5.2/ and the wire number. And they don't seem correspond to any other number in this book. Maybe they correspond to a book I don't have ?

Actually I figured it out It means page and column on next page or where ever.