"barry, KI7FGE" wrote in message
...

groupies:,
i am trying to help out a friend of mine; he owns a screw machine shop (yes,
he keeps fairly busy, has about 10 mechanical cam machines) and he has
purchased a used CNCm, his first.

the machine is an ATRUMP knee mill w/ a Centroid retrofit; purchased from
the owner of a closed shop who knew nothing about the machine (yes, i know);
price was fairly good ($2900) - the mill itself is very clean, no machining
into the table, etc; the control and wiring is very clean also. he moved
the unit to his shop, set everything up; powering up the machine resulted in
the display showing about 7 ot 8 thin horizontal lines - about 15 seconds
later the display started showing "white cloudy" crap from top to bottom of
display on the right side moving to fill the screen all the ways to the
right; this was only left on for a few minutes, so maybe we should have let
it go for awhile longer; this was tried a couple times, and finally shut
down. the machine is powered up on 3-phase power (industrial grade shop);
no other information was visible on the display.

this, of course, called for removal of the control from it's mount,
disconnection of all cabling, and onto the bench. opening up the control
showed a fairly clean guts; BUT after poking around a little reveals some
cut wires, some dead-ended connections, some "extra wires", etc.; we did not
as yet pull a whole lot apart as yet as it requires removal of a lot of
interboard/monitor/power supply/front panel connections, and we're not quite
ready to do that yet. i am hoping to document as much of the insides as
possible w/ jpegs, video, etc in the next few days. i am reading up online
as much as possible as i'm not familiar w/ control and we do not want to
disturb as much as possible - but to get to all the boards it does require
removing quite a it of wire and connectors.

data plate shows;
MODEL M-15
S/N 4776

attempting to document actual board numbers (ie motherboard, etc.) was
difficult without complete or almost complete removal. i have downloaded as
much info as possible from the web (operators manual, motherboard IDs &
photos, etc), but nothing real helpful as yet. my first questions is:

is there a service manual for the centroid controls, wiring diagrams, etc
available anywhere (free or otherewise)?

my searching says that possibly there might be a video take-off on the main
board to connect an external monitor - so far i cannot see such a thing.

we will need it to figure out the cut wires, disconnected wires, etc. i
understand that having centroid do the actual work might be costly, and my
friend isn't real bucks-up right now after buying the machine. any
assistance, ideas, death threats, etc always welcome.

more as we dive into it.

TIA!
barry, KI7FGE
carson city, nv

*******************

Its likely those cut and unconnected wires were always such. Centroid makes
controls that can be retrofit to a number of machines, and even retrofit
packages to retrofit other controls. I'm sure they do not make an
individual control for every machine possibility with just enough features
and wires for that application. Unfortunately I have never setup a Centroid
control. The only one I know who has recently is Lloyd Sponenburgh. Sadly
due the noise to signal ration he no longer participates in this group. He
retrofit a Centroid control to a mill that previously had a Heidenhain
controller using a direct replacement "package" from Centroid. You might
try contacting him through the CamBam forum. He's on there almost everyday.

That being said, have you contacted Centroid? They are still around and
have even broken into the hobby market recently with their Acorn controller.
It may cost a little to get manuals and some tech support from them (I don't
know), but it might be worth it in time saved.