I have a perfectly functional Brother TC229 with a conversational control that I would like to replace with LinuxCNC, I plan to use this machine as tool to make money and am prepared to spend several thousand to get it to work, including making the toolchanger and rigid tapping functions operate.
The servodrives seem to be some customized variant of a Sankyo Denki PZ series drive. Unfortunately a manual or even a pinout of the drives in this machine does not seem to be available, Sankyo Denki is not too interested in providing me with any documentation.
My plan is to build a special wiring harness (15 pins) to place between the controller and the drives to try to determine what signals are being sent between the two. Is this totally mission impossible? Has anyone else accomplished such a thing? what I can I expect the command signal from the controller to the individual drives to look like? The X, Y and Z amplifiers all have the same part number, where do the servo tuning parameters (which must be different for each axis) reside?
If interfacing with the existing drives is too ambitious, can I at least keep the motors and replace the drives with ones that have full documentation?