[justin bowser]

I have acquired A Light Machines Corporation SpectraLIGHT "micro" lathe, circa 1984ish. It has the black box (which I assume contains the motor drivers), cables, software, and manual, but no interface card for the PC. I have done a search on the forum and have not had much luck other than discovering the controller/interface PCB is rather expensive and several people in the past have posted basically the same request without a whole lot of response. :-\

I have came to the conclusion that a viable solution may be to use a more modern I/O and motor driver arrangement along with maybe some public domain software (if there is such a thing). Although I know my way around a conventional mill and lathe I am a total newb as far as CNC is concerned and felt this might give me the opportunity to learn something "on the cheap".

Any words of wisdom, compass headings for my search, or sympathy would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Justin B.

[Al_The_Man]

What kind of drives and servo motors does it have? or Steppers?
The Mach software is what many people here use, I believe it is free up to so many lines of code.
If no one has info on this particular model, you may have to reverse engineer the servo/drive portion.
If it had a slot based controller, it may have been analogue control, rather than the step/direction that mach uses.
Al.

[justin bowser]

Right now I have no idea, they really don't look like any of the steper motors I've worked with in computer printing products. The motors are rather long (2-3 inches) and round (probably 1.75-2 inch). I'll physically have possesion of it in a couple of weeks so I'll be better able to provide more detail.

I have some stepper motors I salvaged from some old computer printer sheet-feeders about 20 years ago, maybe it would be better to use something like that...

[Al_The_Man]

If you have servo's then they should have encoders, in that case I would stick with them, performance is a bit superior and the mounts are all ready there.
Al.