Hi all,

I am brand new here and am really excited to have found such a great resource for information. I am a high school teacher that has an Intelitek Prolight 1000 mill. Recently, the proprietary PCI card that came with the mill died (as diagnosed by Intelitek ). I have been doing tons of research and learning in regards to retrofitting these mills. From what I understand, the mill itself is pretty hardy and built to last. Unfortunately, the card replacement from Intelitek is $695.

With that kind of budget, I've been looking at retrofitting with this:

Deepgroove1 Gecko control box

Sounds like the Gecko 540 is the way to go and upgrading the steppers would add to the life and performance of the machine not to mention cut out the work of finding/fabricating the housing, power supply, and pre wired motors.

After all of my reading and searching this forum and others, I am still apprehensive about wiring and getting this thing to work. I've gotten the green light to either purchase the replacement card or upgrade to the above mentioned unit. I understand I will need to use Mach 3 or something other than the Intelitek software to run the mill, but beyond that I haven't been able to find any clear instructions, write-ups, or walk throughs (which I surely thought there would be out there).

If anyone has done this retrofit before and would be willing to lend some advice or provide a link to any resources that I haven't already been able to find I would greatly appreciate it. I would also welcome anyone weighing the benefits of just going back with Intelitek and paying the high cost of the card.




Nick