Embroidery machine retrofit.

So i have an embroidery machine that is missing it's control. I'm debating making it into a Linux cnc one.

Thoughts? Any other options you might recommend instead? is a partial teardown 

EDIT: So looking at it I have the following I would need to control. All looks somewhat simple although the devil is in the details.

Outputs
X stepper Motor
Y stepper Motor
Sewing machine motor. 
Tension solenoid
Bobbin winding motor (Likely just a switch as it does not need to be involved in the CNC part)

Sensors. All look to be the non contact style where you slide something between them. Forget the name offhand.
X homing
Y homing. (Not positive it exists but x does so y should.)
Encoder disk.
2 needle position sensors. Not sure why both but 1 is longer than the other
Top thread lost sensor
Bobbin sensor (Position or thread lost. Assuming thread lost for now.)

So it does and i have plenty of computers with parallel ports. But all my googling shows that it hooked to a custom controller ( www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-m...s-stellar-1807616721 ) i have no clue the commands to make anything happen. If anybody has any ideas i am willing to go that route as well.

is the rest of the sensors for the needle and such.

I Have a few esp8266 boards. I don't think i can find any of my arduinos but I could probably borrow one from work if I drive across town.

Im willing to try with the signal generator. And while I am gonna have printer cables I highly doubt I have a non standard centronics cable laying around.

What do I need to do with the signal generator? (If it helps I also have a pokit pro multimeter/oscilloscope.) Just feed a signal in on 2 and see if it comes back out on 4 or ?

EDIT: www.ebay.com/itm/334194855041 From looking at this I do not believe there is any other connectors so I bet power feeds through the centronics connector as well. Don't recall if thats a thing on normal ones or not.

Janome is still around, maybe it's worth it to contact them and ask for data sheets on either the board itself (716- or the driver IC:s (SI-7200J)? A long shot, but getting data sheets would make things much easier.

I think pin 2 and 4 was assuming a standard 36 pin Centronics connector? Given the 50-pin port, I think you have to do some reverse engineering before hooking up a signal generator. Some things to start with:

* Which pins are connected to GND? (Measure continuity between pins and the PCB ground plane, marked as GND in lower right corner of pictures).
* Which pins are connected to power? (Power supplies and cables are not visible in the pictures; I assume that these are on the other side of the steel plate and connects to the underside of the board?) Find any external power supplies that connect to the board and measure the voltage(s) they supply, then see if you can find additional power regulators on the board. I.e. identify the power rails that exist on the board, and map out pins on the Centronics connector that connect to these.
* Which pins connect to pins on the driver IC:s? These are the ones you might want to hook up to a signal gen to see if you get motor movement. It might be tricky though if there are e.g. enable inputs that needs to be activated.

Ha! A search for Sanken 7200 gives a few results:

A - pin 7
/A - pin 6
B - pin 12
/B - pin 13
Power down (active high) - pin 9
GND - pins 8, 3, 6
Motor coils - pins 2, 4, 17, 15
Vcc - pin 10

Pin 11 seems to be some kind of clock input? Connects to a 555 circuit in the data sheet. Maybe for a high side charge pump? Anyway, finding which pins connect to A, /A, B, /B and figuring out if the disable input needs to be deactived through some Centronics pin should do the trick!

Im gonna see if I can clean off a table to work on this tomorrow. Tailgate was only good for a quick teardown.
There is a white box and transformer on top that is visible in the video in the first post. I will try and get measurements on the output tomorrow. (Assuming the white box is the power supply. Small chance it is a variable speed controller for the main motor.

The issue with reverse engineering it is while I have the ability to do a fair bit hardware side I would assume there is a protocol involved. If I had the controller it would be different as I have access to a multi channel oscilloscope that I could use to reverse engineer said protocol.

If I go linuxcnc (Or grbl or the like) I would need to get a pair of stepper controllers, Probably a variable speed controller for the main motor and that should be it. Maybe a lpt breakout board as I don't think I would need a mesa for this.

Ive got a stack of old 2008 era cash registers that should run linux cnc. (Pretty much a standard pc but they have like 4 serial ports and a parallel port as well as a touch screen.) If they don't work I have others but they are the handy ones.