Folks,

I picked up 6 Sanyo Denki P5 servos for a VERY reasonable price, three 100W and three 1kw servos. They appear to be almost brand new, which matches the description of their previous life from the seller to a tee. The smaller servos have grease in a gear reducer attached to the output shaft and the grease looks absolutely brand new.

The only odd feature of these servos is the encoder. All six servos have the same encoder on them: Kawasaki M21KA6Z0100B encoders. They are fairly small diameters encoders (case is about 1 1/2" in diameter).

The very odd part of them is the wiring. They only have four wires coming out:
Red
Black
White
Blue
and the wiring is done with what ALMOST looks like CAT5 twisted pair cable with red/black and white/blue twisted tightly and then the pairs loosely twisted together.

I pulled the case off of one encoder and it very much is an optical encoder with very tightly packed SMD components. In the quick inspection I was able to give the encoder, I did see a MAX417 (dual opamp) near the cable, but I did not have time to see how this thing is wired.

Anyone have any experience with these encoders? From looking at them, it almost looks like they are either outputting a differential resolver signal or possibly a serial type of communications. Needless to say, any help in figuring these things out would be greatly appreciated!