Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

Good evening all,

After a bit of a hiatus i'm back in the centroid world. Its been a couple years since I've touched a centroid control, but I have two machines that I'm looking to get back up an running.

The first is a Nardini fast trace lathe. This would have started life with a fanuc control, but at some point down the road it was retrofited to a centroid M39S control. I'm guessing this was an Ajax upgrade kit that was sold. From the looks of the cabinet id say it was probably a diy attempt.

The lathe powers on an functions, but having completed an installation with an oak control last time around im a bit hopeful there is a direct path to bringing this machine up to the current generation without gutting the hardware side of it.

Things on my wishlist:
- USB drive capability.
- CNC 12 would be nice albeit probably not necessary.
- I'd really like the wireless MPG. This one has a bulky mpg that is wired and beat to heck.
- Touchscreen with VCP would nice as well.

Looking for feedback on what is possible to get my wishlist above. I'm sure i could spend the coin and drop in a ALLINONEDC board and all my dreams would come true. Is the current DC3IOB capable of hitting this wishlist without that drastic measure? From what I can tell its using the a CPU7 and not an MPU11.

I'm Hoping Centroid will be able to tell me more about it from the Serial number in the photos.

Thanks again.
-Joel

One last photo

I would definitely strip the wiring from that cabinet and do it over. That is pretty pathetic.

For what it's worth, that control would have started life as a factory-wired cabinet in early 2004, with a SERVO3IO unit. The DC3IOB was a replacement, probably installed early 2010. Part of the reason for the rats' nest wiring is that terminals on the DC3IO are in different locations than on the SERVO3IO, and whoever did the changeover didn't put much effort into it.

Two of the shorter paths to current CNC12 software (in each case assuming you put together your own PC and monitor) are:
1) Buy an Allin1DC unit to replace the CPU7 and DC3IOB
2) Buy an MPU11 board, and send the DC3IOB to Centroid to be reprogrammed to work with MPU11.

Option (2) would probably be a few hundred dollars cheaper, but option (1) would be cleaner and better supported.

In either case, you will want to return the CPU7 board to Centroid for a $250 credit toward the Pro software license. The "Legacy Pro Upgrade" license is $299, vs. $549 to purchase Pro without the trade-in.

Once you are up and running with CNC12 (on either an Allin1DC unit or MPU11+DC3IOB combination) then you can add the wireless MPG at your convenience; use a touch screen and VCP if you wish; and all the other things that come with CNC12.

Using Allin1DC would allow you to put a spindle load meter on the screen, because Allin1DC has an analog input for that purpose. The MPU11+DC3IOB combination cannot do that.

Thank you Mark,

I sorta guessed that id be in for a board replacement. Since I'm not actively using the lathe much at this point and have a few other irons in the fire I'm probably just going to live with this setup until I'm ready to go for the all in one.

That said:
I'm guessing I can get a USB to play nice with this setup? Its got a floppy drive on it and I have a floppy attachment I bought for my PC, but transferring files via floppy is a pain and is asking for trouble in my opinion.

Is there any specific usb hardware I should pick up to integrate? Anything on the software side I'll need to address when adding the usb port?

I should probably update to the highest level software available on the machine. Can I get some guidance on what would be the recommended update level/version?

Thank you again.
-Joel

I do not know any way to make USB drives work under MS-DOS.

If you were to upgrade to Linux and CNC10 v2.72, then you could use USB drives.

Doing that would require a computer motherboard that is compatible/supported by Centroid's Linux installation, but which still has an ISA expansion slot. The MSI MS-6368L is the best choice that I know of.

What motherboard is in your computer? How much memory is on it? What model is the CPU, and how fast is it?

If you have an MS-6368 motherboard; at least 512MB memory; and at least an 800MHz processor, then migrating to Linux and CNC10 is a possibility.

Have you had any luck trying a floppy drive emulator?

The limitation of emulators is you are limited to 1.44mb. Some emulators allow you to have multiple floppy "disks" on a thumb drive, but files can't span them, so you are limited to g-code files of less than 1.44mb.

Marc's suggestion #1 is probably the best route.