This is the latest addition to the linuxcnc family, an old industrial plasma cutter with IHS and AHC.
Took about 4 days from start to finish, left most of original installation intact, removed the 2 servo drives and the big transformer used to supply power to drives, installed 2 gecko 320 servo drives and a big DC power supply, connected all the limit switches to the parallel port with needed modifications for adapting 24V signalling to 3.3V, left the E-stop and extreme limit switches intact ( all this will cut the power to the machine completely if things get out of hands ), made some more circuits for the "torch on" and "arc ok" signals, and added the hal component to wait for "arc ok" before moving.
Did some test cuts, and the results are awesome.
The actual plasma is a Hypertherm 3070 with original torch, water cooled of course. Need to attach the air cooler.
Compared to the original system with an unusable monitor, this is a joy to work on.
For anyone who might be wondering, everything is connected directly to parallel port with the added simple voltage dividers and a relay, a transistor (darlington) and some more resistors. Unfortunately i did not have mesa cards at hand, and getting them here is not easy, so i decided on this setup.
The owner was reluctant to do the retrofit, but now he is more than happy with the results and the ease of use, it took him about 4 hours to learn to use the machine.
Regards,
Tom
P.S. i am attaching the pictures at no particular order, they should be self explanatory.
