[URSTech]

Hi all. So the machine shop that is attached to my engineering firm has an old (1988) RoboTool CVM-1 sitting in the corner of its shop. the mill is in pristine condition and they said it held tight tolerance before the control box stopped working about 5 years ago. They said they were able to coax it for a while (aka hit the side and "sweet talk it") but it just got less and less reliable over time, until they finally just put it in the corner and left it.

Anyhow I pitched the idea to my boss of seeing if we could retrofit a PC to the CNC mill as a cheaper alternative to replacing the control box (which they already priced a replacement at something like $10k) So the real question is it even possible to remove the control box and setup a Windows PC in its place? I could probably persuade them to pay up to $1k for the retrofit, more then that would be hard. We also have several electricians and electrical engineers that I could probably tap as a resource if that were required.

The motivation here is that they said I could use the machine as a training unit to learn CAM/GC on so I'm pretty interested in seeing this work if I can. Plus having another CNC for the odd job around the shop has the machinists happy. This was their first CNC mill back in the day so there would be a little nostalgia at seeing the "old dinosaur" up and running again.

Anyhow any thoughts on a PC conversion or a low cost control box alternative for a RoboTool CVM-1?

[pippin88]

You should buy it for cheap, I mean it's not doing then any good sitting in the corner...

[URSTech]

They actually offered the mill to me for free, but I really don't have a place to put it or the necessary electrical setup. nor do I have the 1-2k to blow on a PC controller setup. Since they are willing to pay for all that and setup the mill in their own shop making it available to me, that seems like a pretty ideal setup.

Anyhow I am currently researching various hardware/software packages from CNC4PC, camsoft, Centroid and a few others. Will update the thread once we decide on a unit and maybe provide some setup/install info once I get it going.