Hardware/Software Needed

I have a Mitutoyo F805 CMM.

The current system is running at 100/mhz on windows 2.1. The 20+ year old floppies with the drivers/software all are unreadable probably due to there age. I could run down on all the motherboard issues this thing has but that's not productive at all. I am essentially being forced to upgrade a much needed upgrade.

My first question is will linuxcnc work with this old CMM?

The control board is ISA ,my first thought is use a PCI/ISA Riser or maybe even a ISA/USB but my second question is do I really need to keep the old ISA board? I have seen on this forum others talking about the mesa driver boards however I'm not sure if these would work or not for this application.

I looked into more modern motherboards with ISA slots and lets just say the price is ridiculous. If I can upgrade this machine without having to carry over this huge ISA board then it allows me to focus less on the hardware aspect of this project. If you need more info to help in answering some of these questions let me know. Thanks for any help guy's!

andypugh wrote:

LinuxCNC probably can be configured to interpret the scales on your CMM. But if it is a manual CMM then I suspect that it would be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

what do you require the PC to do?

This CMM is Manual. What we are trying to accomplish is a hardware/software upgrade. If linuxcnc is only capable of reading the X/Y/Z Axis then that would be comparable to what I have now.



The CMM hooks to a controller



The controller outputs to the controller board



Which is hooked to a control board





The Ps/2 ports on this relic are non operational. The onboard battery went dead and the bios reset com port 1 to disabled. Com port 1 operates the control board.

That's just one of the problems though. Drivers for this system are almost impossible to find. The backup disks are unreadable. I've been running linux on most of my systems for the past 20 years so going back to DOS after all this time is a major headache.

Now I went looking for a PC with comparable/maybe better specs then the current one and at least one ISA slot. Thinking it would be easier/cheaper alternative. Seems as though this is a common thing with old industrial equipment and prices exceed $500 on a 100-200/mhz system with windows 95/98. I didn't pay that much for one of those systems 20 years ago sure not going to pay it now.

I can pick up a or build a machine 10x faster for half the price. The control board is the only problem in this equation. As you can see in the picture the thing is huge. ISA is outdated so any motherboard with ISA is going to cost more. I should be able to pull the drivers from the existing harddrive but is it really worth it. ISA is only going to get harder to find in the future and from what I can tell the ISA board only operates the control board.

So to break it down if I can get axis readouts from linuxcnc that is a start. If I can zero them out thats also a plus. I have no problem investing money just looking for a little direction instead of doing this the old trial/error way.

Thanks for any help