This Forum Is GREAT!!

[Sean Mercer]

I don't know when this forum began, but I wish I knew sooner.

I just yanked the Philips control in preparation for a retrofit. (By the way, I'm selling it... ebay listing 130318075301)

I plan installing a Dynapath 5 axis control on my MH 700C. and using Heidenhain LS 403 scales.

Someone who emailed me yesterday turned me on to this forum, and said "If you pull it off, you'll be a hero to the Maho community"

I've never been a hero before, so I'll do my best.

If anyone wants to help, I'll buy the pizza and beer.

[Milacron]

Welcome Sean and keep up abreast of your retrofit progress. You might even consider using the Practical Machinist Blog section to do a blog on the saga.

Then again if documenting the progress adds to the "overwhelming" aspects of it, forget it...just get 'er done, m'man !

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Btw, I'm curious how you adapted the old control to use a modern monitor ? I figured out the R/G/B/H/V wiring on my Maho's and have used an LCD monitor on one of them but it is a special low frequency LCD monitor that will go down to 15 kHz horizontal. Most modern LCD monitors won't display below 32 kHz horizontal. Did you build a scan rate doubler or what ?

[Sean Mercer]

with this little gem.

I used one on a Magnaturn CNC lathe as well.

The pixels a re a little fuzzy, but for the $92 and a spare monitor it works well.

Sean

[Sean Mercer]

http://www.ambery.com/rgbcgatovgac.html

[Milacron]

Originally Posted by Sean Mercer

http://www.ambery.com/rgbcgatovgac.html

Well I'll be damn... funny, as a group of us were scanning the WWW looking for something exactly like that a couple years ago and found lots of converters that came close to what we wanted for CGA to VGA conversion, but nothing quite right for the purpose. But you have found The Holy Grail right there.... except the mention of fuzzy pixels is a little worrisome. The special LCD monitor I used looks a hair fuzzy in the photo but in real life the text is razor sharp...vastly superior to the original CRT images (even when the CRT was new probably)

The monitor I used in the below Deckel D11 control was a standard home/office desktop monitor but lower than normal horiz freq..... but no where near low enough for a Maho control.... seems like it was about 26 kHz. I took the monitor case apart so I ended up with just the basic metal frame, which had handy screw tabs for mounting.....and tied the menu control board to the inside.



But I will have to try one of the Ambery converters to see...thanks !

[Sean Mercer]

The retrofit is going to be a long process...on and off over a period of time.
I will try to document as I go.
This will be my first retrofit in my SHORT 4 years involved with CNC.

Believe it or not, I' an EXTREME hobbiest, trying to make things happen.

I'm an art professor and got interested in CNC as an extension to solid modeling for design work. Now, I want to quit my tenured teaching job, make art and cut things.

I like to believe I can figure most things out, but this forum will be a tremendous resource as I get into the thick of it. I only wish I knew about this a while ago...perhaps I wouldn't have yanked the control...Oh well, as my dad always says, what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.

If you're interested, check out my artwork at

http://www.msmercer.com

Thanks for the warm welcome!!

[Ries]

Its good to see another artist using machining in their work.
Not enough of us, in my opinion.

I do not have a Maho, or a CNC mill or lathe at this point, but I do a fair amount of machining in my sculpture- all day yesterday, I was back and forth between the mill, the lathe, and the forge and powerhammer.
While I doubt I will try to retrofit a Maho, a CNC mill is definitely in my future.

[The Raddish]

Originally Posted by Milacron

I figured out the R/G/B/H/V wiring on my Maho's and have used an LCD monitor on one of them but it is a special low frequency LCD monitor that will go down to 15 kHz horizontal.

What is the pinout? We have a Maho 500C with a CRT that is about gone. We got the controller listed earlier in this post but it is not 'standard' CGA on teh DB9.

Any help would be great!

[The Raddish]

I answered my own question. The pinout for the CGA DB9 on the bottom of the Philips 432 control is:

1 GND
2 Green
3
4 Vert Sync
5
6 Horiz Sync
7 Red
8
9 Blue

The colors represent signal names, not wire colors. The way I found these is to use a Fluke 45 meter to ohm out which wire was ground (check each wire and the one that has the lowest resistance to the frame of the control is the ground wire), then use the frequency setting to find the horizontal sync (closest to 15.7kHz) and vertical sync (closest to 60 Hz) with reference to the ground wire. The RGB colors I just swapped around until the screen looked correct.

Hope this information helps someone.

[AndreasL]

Awsome!

Thanks for the information on the converter.

My screen are almost unused, but really good to know.

About the retrofit...

Good luck!

[AndreasL]

Any progress on this one?