Looking for advice retrofitting older CNC

Greetings.

I'm new to linuxCNC (and CNC in general). I've been "gifted" a Stinger CNC after the owner upgraded to a newer machine because he was having problems with the software on this one. It came with an OLD tower PC running WinXP and WinCNC. This was connected via parallel port to another box that housed the controller and other electronics like the emergency shutoff switch, etc.  The controller it uses is a Testra 4x483Q.  I've purchased a mini-pc with a parallel port and loaded linuxCNC on it. I've begun trying to get it configured to talk to the controller but it's not natively compatible and it's been giving me some issues. Frankly, I'd just as soon put new controllers into the box that are natively supported by LinuxCNC but before I go spending hundreds of dollars on what would be a stab in the dark for me, I thought I'd ask for some advice.  Oh, I've also purchased a 3-phase, 220V (chinesium) spindle with an H100-series "High Performance Vector Control Inverter" to replace the router it came with so I'd like/need to be able to control that as well.  Any help or advice you can offer will be appreciated. Do I keep fighting with getting the old controller to talk to LinuxCNC or do I get a new set of controllers, power supplies, etc that are known to work with LinuxCNC and build it back up myself (and hopefully learn something along the way?). Recommendations for controllers and power supplies would be great.

Thanks!

Hmmm... Can't figure out how to edit a post. Here's an image of the controller

Looks like that should be relatively easy to get working
with a parallel port and LinuxCNC + StepConf since
it was designed for a standard parallel port interface.

What issues did you have?

Haha, you are in luck that someone bothered to print information on that thing.

I would 

• provided nothing damaged on the machine, not touch its electrics. 
• get it running without integrating the spindle into the control. (safe that machine configuration)
• start working on spindle integration with another machine configuration (that way you can take your time to figure it out and still use the machine to cut something)

Did you do your latency test? Keep in mind: Should you have to replace the PC, a PCI or PCIe parallelport card is a means to provide a parallelport for cheap. No need to hunt down a PC with onboard parallel port.

Chances are that you can drive the VFD via PWM directly. (maybe a digital potentiometer is an easy way to do) A 2nd parallel port can be added if there is not enough IO left for the VFD.

 

Yes, that label with all the specifications is great!

The pin numbers on that label are the exact pin numbers on a parallel port, so enter those in the StepConf wizard.
As for spindle, almost all new VFD's will accept 0-5V or 0-10V that can be set, so setting it to 5V and using a resistor and a capacitor will give you roughly 0-4.5V of analog voltage from a 5V parallel port, or 0-3V from a 3.3V parallel port.

Thanks for the information. One of the issues I'm running into is something to do with needing an "enable" signal or something. Still working through that.

I did the latency test. It came out around 150 nanoseconds if I remember correctly.

Option JP2 on the label, set it to always on for now.