Re: Fanic O-T retrofit ease
I can give you my experience retrofitting a Fanuc OT. My reason for retrofitting was adding features and ease of use, I found the OT to be a PITA to run the way I wanted to and I don't have a lot a patients with antique controllers.
If the battery is dead, the parameters are gone. They can be reloaded manually if they are written down somewhere, if not, best of luck.
After about '88 Fanuc went to the ''Pulse Coder'' type of motors & drives. And they are red cap, but I think some of the earlier red cap motors were not Pulse Coder, but don't hold me to this. If the motors are Pulse Coder motors it will be indicated on the label. The Black cap (AC servo) and Yellow cap (DC servo) motors may be relatively easy to reuse. I do understand that it is possible to replace the encoders on the PulseCoder motors and run them with a new servo drive. Centroid seems to have a method of doing this. As far as I know it is not possible to run the Pulse Coder drives with anything except the Fanuc controller because the ''brains'' of the drive is actually in the controller.
I figured out the above about halfway into the retrofit, not the best time to do the research, especially when you need the machine.
So what I did, is rip out everything that said Fanuc on it with the exception of the spindle motor and replaced it with my own controller and DMM Tech servos. The spindle motor in mine is not a servo, but rather a standard(ish) 3 phase motor. It runs fine on a sensorless vector VFD.
Here is the short version of the retrofit. https://www.cnczone.com/forums/hardi...-software.html
Jim Dawson
Sandy, Oregon, USA