Bridgeport Boss 9 conversion, using the EAF board

Hello! I am getting further along with my conversion project and have a question. I am converting a Bridgeport R2E4 machine (Boss 9 controller). It has a fairly nice architecture and I'm trying to keep as much of the old controls (which worked pretty well) but gutting the CPUs in favor of EMC. I am using a Mesa 5i20 to interface to the original servo amps and encoders, which seems like it will be a pretty straightforward configuration. The machine has a separate board called the EAF which handles all the "dirty" IO on the machine (home switches, coolant control, spindle control, e-stop indicator etc) and has all the high current drivers for these components. The EAF interfaces to the original control over RS422. My thought is if I just hook this board up to my EMC2 PC over RS422 I can maintain that nice isolation and have fairly limited rewiring to do.

So question is: Is it feasible to interface the IO's over a serial port like this? None of the signals are "realtime" (with the possible exception of the home switches). I should just be able to write a little userspace HAL component correct?

There is still the question of reverse-engineering the protocol to the board. The maintenance manual has some hints (and schematics) but doesn't spell it out completely.

The alternative is I could rip out the microcontroller on this board and hack a mesa isolated IO card to it to drive all the existing relays etc.

If anyone has done this (or something similar) I'd love to hear about it!

I too have a BP boss 9 R2E4 and was curious how your conversion went? And if you were successful in re-using the EAF board?

I am still working on my conversion. I'm planning on snooping the EAF traffic when I get a chance. It isn't very much data and the users manual description mostly describes the bit ordering etc. I don't see why I can't do it this way and it grossly simplifies the install.

One issue is that the SFP still pulls in the gear selector switch and I don't plan to use the SFP. I was thinking I would route the gear selector IO to an usused input on the EAF (like the indexer control).

How did these conversions go? I am in the process of doing the exact same thing and having trouble with the connectin to the amps with the mesa boards.

are both of these done?

Sorry I missed your reply previously. I shelved this project for a while but plan to finish it in the next few weeks.

I decided that hacking the EAF board's serial interface into EMC2 is probably more work than it is worth, but I am still going to reuse the EAF. I am planning to use a Mesa 7i69 (48 TTL GPIOs) to essentially replace the microcontroller on the EAF but reuse all its opto's, drive transistors etc. This way I will have limited rewiring required. I am going to pull IC13,IC14,IC16,IC17, which are the three buffers and the microcontroller. I'll wire these sockets to the 7i69 to drive the output and input pins that are relevant directly as GPIOs. I will also power the 7i69 from the EAF's 5v supply.

Did you ever finish your conversion?

I decided not to convert for now because the original control is fully functional. Iahve been cutting parts with it. I am going to use the mesa boards for a Hitachi VM40 I just purchased. Still researching the drives and control.

IF the Bridgeport controls ever crap[ out I will upgradefor sure.