Hurco Hawk 5M Retrofit w/ existing motors

Yes, the 5i25/7i77, 6i25/7i77 or 7i92/7i77 combinations (PCI/PCIE/Ethernet)
are Mesa's most common analog servo interface card sets and usually the
best choice if you choose Mesa cards for a analog servo+quadrature encoder
retrofit.

Thank you for confirming that detail for me. I'm servo ignorant and trying to read up on what ever information I can find. As a side note I ordered a oscilloscope that will be here Sunday just so I can test the motors and encoders before spending the $300 on the Mesa cards. Are there any other pitfalls I should look out for or am I on the right track?

There are always pitfalls, even on the right track.

But this sounds like a reasonably conventional retrofit.

Thanks a lot, guys for laying eyes on my thread here and weighing in on it. I went ahead and ordered the mesa cards, they are a week out. I'm just going to work on building me a custom ui for the machine in the mean time. I had thought about going with the Path Pilot interface but I think I'd rather build up my own based around axis. I've been reading through the pyvcp portion of the documentation and it's all very straightforward. I'd really just like to add tabs to the existing set of tabs in axis instead of creating a new est of tabs. I don't see this mentioned in the documentation or maybe I just missed it. Is there an easy way o do this?

I really want to add tabs for a tool table, work offsets and probing.

Yes, you can add PyVCP or GladeVCP panels as tabs in most of the UIs.

linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/gui/gladevcp....ladevcp:embeding-tab

With PyVCP I thought that you could use:
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/gui/pyvcp.html#_stand_alone
With the EMBED_TAB command in the INI the docs seem to say that this is only for GladeVCP
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/config/ini-co...tml#_display_section

Glade is a lot more powerful than PyVCP anyway, I would advocate using it.

Also look at Gscreen, a GUI _designed_ to be customised.
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/gui/gscreen.html

Thank for the fast reply and tip, I'll look into Gscreen and then Glade.