Dennis you DONT have to change the drives out. The drives you have are analogue drives, that means the control sends them a voltage between 0 and +10v for one direction and 0 to -10v for the other. What the pixies do is take the step and direction from Mach and pass it onto your  drives as an analogue voltage, ie +-10v.
 You really need to get schematics for your drives so that you know where you need to connect the pixies to.
Hood

Hood
I have the schematics for the complete electrical system, the system dose come on then poops out i have been down this road before trying to repair the exisisting system only to find out down the road it's old technology and then have to gut it out.
Well it's good to hear that i can salvage some part of the system so the pixes take the place of the existing brain and control head is there a interperter board avaliable for the pixes so all i have to do is wire the pixes and plug the computor to it such as the CNC4PC boards.

Dennis

Hood
Where are the pixes made are they in the USA.

Dennis

Dennis

Hears a link to the Pixie boards.   http://www.skyko.com/products/

Skyko Technologies
219 Skywall Drive
Sultan, WA 98294

Chip

Dennis you can use any breakout board, the acustep from  www.cncbuildingblocks.com  and PMDX122 from www.pmdx.com are the two boards I have used. www.cnc4pc.com  do them, www.campbelldesigns.com do them and there are more, choice is yours. The Acustep does Index homing so thats why I have that for the lathe. Some of the others have other functions on them such as spindle controller etc so depends on what features you want and which price looks good I suppose..

Hood

Hi Chip
Thank's  Hood well the first thing i need to figure out is if the drives function before spending a lot of money would you guy's no of a way to test them out.

Can you power the drives up? If you can then you could probably put a battery onto the terminals that get the analogue voltage from the controls. If you get one of the PP3 9v batteries that are often in things like multimeters you can put it one way and the motor should move at near rapid speed. Reverse the polarity and it should move the other way.
Heres a pic of a PP3 just in case they are different named in the USA.

Hood

Hood
This morning i took off the back's of the servo motor's and powered them directly and they all worked so at least i know they work don't know about the counter's though next i have been trying to get the drives up but i keep getting a voltage led coming on so something is going on there may just have to buy new drives for the system as well hope not so far other then the tech support at Lagun no one has been very helpfull Lagun dose not support the dyan path stuff only the machine.

Dennis   

Dennis

Have you checked all the power supply voltages ?

If you hold the reset button in (if it has one) do the drives Lockup ?

Can you identify the voltage led that's coming on ?

If your encoders have power on them, Check with a volt meter at the +_ 10 volt terminals for voltage, Between CPU and Servo control.

Then turn the servo motor by hand and look for a voltage change, One way - volts the other way + volts ?

Chip

Hood & Chip
Chip and I had a good conversation this morning on the phone what i have decided is to gut the machine and start fresh going for the Geckos 302 and then i need an interface card to plug in the PC and run Mach i am going to look at the ones Hood you recommended thanks a Bunch you guy's it's great to have a place to go and get this kind of experience you just can't buy this.

Dennis