17 Jan
2025
17 Jan
'25
9:03 a.m.
On 1/17/25 10:43, Nigel Johnson Ham via cctalk wrote:
I may be clutching at straws here, but Fanuc was a GE
company, was it not? And I know that GE had a relationship
with Matsushita back in the 70s. Our local GE rep
(Toronto, Canada) offered Matsushita product where they
didn't have a fit. Maybe try looking there?
In 1986, GE and Fanuc entered a partnership to sell more
modern CNC controls. GE's CNC controls were insanely
old-school, their Mark Century controls used hundreds of
boards with Germanium transistors to do tape NC control. If
you wanted linear interpolation, they added about 100
boards. If you wanted circular interpolation, they added
several hundred more! They eventually did put their own
computer logic in their controls, but they were years behind
the times. Fanuc brought in 8086-vintage processors to the
mix. The partnership was dissolved in 2009.
Fanuc made some really great motors and encoders, but tried
to make everything secret and proprietary after the early
1990's, which made retrofitting older machines quite difficult.
Jon