Hi all - I recently acquired a [gutted] Chiron FZ08 vmc that reportedly had a Fanuc 21i control on it, which was removed by the original owner. It was expected that there were also likely Alpha amps for the spindle and 3 axes, also which were removed. I'm assuming they were Alphas, due to the remaining mount hole, the mating drive connectors and fiber inputs, plus a couple of Fanuc logos in the cabinet. The axis and spindle motors are all red-caps, such as A06B-0162-B076#7000 (aM6/3000) for the x-drive. I was expecting to either replace the encoders for just incremental or use some of Pico's pulsecoder to incremental converters, if that were the need. I was surprised to see so many Heidenhain logos inside the cabinet on top of a bunch of what appears to be converter boxes. There was no indication on the provisioning paperwork that the mill had scales (glass or otherwise), nor have I found any. The count of boxes is in threes; so the spindle probably ran direct to the amp. Any idea what the setup may have been? I'm retrofitting to LinuxCNC, and haven't specifically chosen replacement drives yet (but may pull from my Tolomatic stash, which requires only incremental encoders, no halls) at least just for testing. Although absolute encoders would be ok, I'm not married to them at the moment.
The encoder wires run in and out of raceways a lot, so it's a little difficult to fully trace, given the wiring of the engraved boxes, including their translation, seem to indicate that they are "1 input, 2 output" devices that may split the encoder signal. 3 of the engraved boxes and 3 of the larger Heid boxes are on one side of the cabinet, while 3 separate larger Heid boxes are on the right hand side. I haven't found an obvious model or part number on these.... Note also that the encoder lines actually run outside the cabinet and loop right back in (meaning there is an "outside" patch point to interrupt the encoder signal and perhaps....connect it to another controller or something? It is an actual loop, not just a split output.)
Here's a couple pix of the toys:
Attachment 206394

Attachment 206396

I can snag more pictures and start tracing back the loom if useful, but if anyone knows what I could do to find a pinout as well as power the assembly to start scoping out signals, I'd certainly appreciate it. I would be ecstatic to find out that the Heid boxes are converting from traditional incremental to FAnuc pulse stream, but wouldn't hold my breath. Once I get back to the shop I should be able to open up the back of the Z axis motor to get an encoder part number....

EDIT: I happened upon some "Huberboxes" on ebay; and a tighter search on Huberbox found some more info for those engraved boxes, which are indeed splitters, such as found at their site here: http://www.huberbox.de/index-Dateien...temabzweig.htm

Thanks,
Ted.