I wasn’t exactly sure where to put this, but this seemed like the best fit. I was just wondering if you guys at Tormach have ever considered offering a pathpilot conversion kit for mills with other controllers. I’ve got a great old Wells-Index mill with a very dated Anilam 1100 controller. Anilam has been out of business for several years and parts are getting not only expensive but also scarce. After getting my feet wet with pathpilot on my 8L it crossed my mind how awesome it would be to be able to convert my Wells-Index to Pathpilot. Just thought I’d throw it out there for y’all to kick around and see what happens.
Thanks for a fantastic product!
Larry Phillips
K&L Machine and Automotive
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Larry,
For reference, you can submit a feature request ticket here: How to Submit a Support Ticket.
On this one specifically, though, I can say that there would be no plans to release any such conversion kits without a significant change in Tormach’s business model. I’d recommend looking into Centroid’s Acorn kit, I have a machine waiting for me to hook one up.
Thank you,
Norman
Thanks guys, I really appreciate this information. This isn’t something I’m looking to do immediately since my Anilam controller is still working, but I’m a realist, and I realize that one of these days I’m going to be in a situation where im going to have to make a decision on how to proceed as far as either retrofitting another controller to this machine or pulling the trigger on purchasing another machine.
You might want to take a look here: ProjectSheetCake · sphasse/sector67-sandbox Wiki · GitHub
We converted two Anilam mills (1100M and a 3300) over to LinuxCNC (the base of PathPilot) before the controllers died and sold the old Anilam parts at a profit.
We’ve also converted some simpler stepper driven machines to PathPilot for a local school who had a single Tormach 440 and was paranoid about letting the students loose on it. They weren’t worried about their DOS based 1980’s tech college mills that were “junk” though so after the conversion the interface was consistent for the students anyways.
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