Greetings, was following a thread here about replacing old dead CRT's on Haas machines, some of which helped a little but the SWI DPM machine (1996 vintage) was not quite as easy.
Long term solution is to replace the control but $7K is a bit to much to swallow coming out of a slow winter. So I needed a kludge fix to get by. In a nut shell, the DPM uses an old PC chassis with an old MDA (MGA) card and related mono CRT monitor. You can just plug a DB-9M cable into the video card but getting it out of the sealed box would take some hole drilling and such. I decided to map out the pins from the video card all the way to the cable inside the pendant that goes to the CRT unit. I had an old mono MDA monitor I strapped to the top of the pendant. I cut and inserted a DB-9F into that short cable and ran the monitor cable out the back. Works very well, but like I said, as a short term solution. Either upgrade control of find a small MDA monitor to go inside the pendant. So, following is the pin out and colors for altering that short cable inside the pendant:
DB-9 on Cable at MDA Card Signal Cable to CRT Pin 1 Black ground Pin A Black Pin 7 White video Pin J Green Pin 8 Red horiz synch Pin F Blue Pin 9 Green vert synch Pin K Brown
So, in other words, cut the 4 wires shown on the edge connector cable (A, J, F and K) and solder them to the pins shown on a DB-9F connector (1, 7, 8 and 9).
Then you can plug any MDA monitor into that connector.
Hope this helps, I know I'm not the only one running vintage SWI machines with monitor troubles.
On another note, would be nice to see an SWI specific group here.
je