Hi all. 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. Summed up I was able to get them interested in retrofitting a pc based controller to the machine and they asked me to price out a complete package including assembly/installation time.

So a little background on myself. I am working as an engineering tech while I work my way through school (2nd year MechE student). I have quite a bit of machining and solidworks experience but very little electronics background. Having said that I have wanted to get a lot more exposure to the electronics/assembly side of things for a while, so I see this PC CNC retrofit as an excellent opportunity to do that.

So I have researched the options for a few weeks now and I really like what I am seeing with the FlashCut system. At least from what I can tell the USB signal generator gives me the ability to plug in my various systems (coolant, 3 axis servos drivers etc) and have a very close to working system. There would be a good bit (aka a lot) of adjustment getting all the servos/systems tuned, but I like how FlashCut seems to have put a very refined packaged together.

My question is will my existing hardware work with FlashCut though? So I am appealing to the more experienced minds here to give me some advice

I have attached some pics of the RoboTool, if you guys need any other info I will try my best to provide it. I do have the installation/maintenance manuals as well.