Hurco KM3 Retrofit

Forgot to upload this sooner. First retrofit, finished in late October '16 after around 3 weeks of work.

The machine is a Hurco KM3 with original BX controller, from 1984. Was ran exclusively by my father since bought in '84. Problem began to show sometime in the 6 months before work began, with a carbonised servo lead sending ~60v into the logic boards. Although replacements were tried, just couldn't iron out some of the problems with the servo system.

Retained the Electrocraft original servos and Randtronics servo amps (Bought a spare set of amps, just-in-case).

Added a new spindle encoder to give Rigid Tapping.

Used Mesa hardware throughout - 5i20, 7i33, 7i42 and a 7i37.

Kept most of the left hand side of the controls, so mostly hardware controlled. Added a sealed kiosk keyboard/mouse that is used primarily for NativeCAM (Wrote a new helical routine for it, which Fern has incorporated into the released package now)

Added some new logic to the Trajectory Planner to give a new emcmotStatus field to indicate what axis (X,Y,Z) is currently moving, to allow the independent Z feed override the Hurco used to have (A feature my father was very fond of when ramping / drilling into unknown and exotic materials)

Video of the machine pocketing out Acetal for a mould pattern:


Some Pictures:




(The Mesa boards in their housing, mounted into the original logic board housing)




(How the control cabinet looked before)

Thanks Andy,

Yeah, the keyboard was a pain when I was trying to hack on some custom comps, since I use Emacs as my editor of choice with c; had to switch to a spare wireless keyboard for a few hours!

Good work, did you used the same servo driver?
If yes can you share the wiring diagram?