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Hello! I am getting further along with my conversion project and have a question. I am converting a Bridgeport R2E4 machine (Boss 9 controller). It has a fairly nice architecture and I'm trying to keep as much of the old controls (which worked pretty well) but gutting the CPUs in favor of EMC. I am using a Mesa 5i20 to interface to the original servo amps and encoders, which seems like it will be a pretty straightforward configuration. The machine has a separate board called the EAF which handles all the "dirty" IO on the machine (home switches, coolant control, spindle control, e-stop indicator etc) and has all the high current drivers for these components. The EAF interfaces to the original control over RS422. My thought is if I just hook this board up to my EMC2 PC over RS422 I can maintain that nice isolation and have fairly limited rewiring to do.

So question is: Is it feasible to interface the IO's over a serial port like this? None of the signals are "realtime" (with the possible exception of the home switches). I should just be able to write a little userspace HAL component correct?

There is still the question of reverse-engineering the protocol to the board. The maintenance manual has some hints (and schematics) but doesn't spell it out completely.

The alternative is I could rip out the microcontroller on this board and hack a mesa isolated IO card to it to drive all the existing relays etc.

If anyone has done this (or something similar) I'd love to hear about it!

I too have a BP boss 9 R2E4 and was curious how your conversion went? And if you were successful in re-using the EAF board?

I am still working on my conversion. I'm planning on snooping the EAF traffic when I get a chance. It isn't very much data and the users manual description mostly describes the bit ordering etc. I don't see why I can't do it this way and it grossly simplifies the install.

One issue is that the SFP still pulls in the gear selector switch and I don't plan to use the SFP. I was thinking I would route the gear selector IO to an usused input on the EAF (like the indexer control).

How did these conversions go? I am in the process of doing the exact same thing and having trouble with the connectin to the amps with the mesa boards.

are both of these done?