24 Aug
2010
24 Aug
'10
3:33 p.m.
On 24 Aug 2010 at 20:20, Arno Kletzander wrote:
some of you will perhaps remember me being stuck with
a problem
regarding a Fujitsu FANUC "mate TG" CNC controller (rebadged as
"Siemens Sinumerik"), of which I have the main unit but not the
monitor. Thanks to a very nice guy living nearby, I was provided with
some new information about the interface, which is rather uncommon in
itself. I had already guessed that there is a significant amount of
smarts in the monitor; the newly acquired documentation confirms this.
The silicon brain (CRT controller) of the thing is called LSI HD46505.
I beleive the HD46505 is basically a clone of the Motorola 6845 CRTC,
so there's not a lot of information there.
Does this ring any bells with anyone? Are there
similar monitors out
there that might be converted with little effort? Otherwise, the
registers and instructions are described in enough detail so that
making a replacement or some sort of emulation at least seems
possible. What sort of hard- and/or software would one be looking at
to accomplish this?
Although I've seen disks from various Fanuc machines, I've never been
up close to the actual controller that you describe. I suspect that
one might be able to cobble up an interface to a commodity PC,
however.
I have some hazy memory of seeing a demonstration of a
Pong game
programmed in LabView(!) running on an FPGA based device which would
directly generate VGA output, but that was a very expensive unit. For
now I'm just looking for a cheap and simple way to give me some idea
of what, if anything, the controller is trying to display.
If you want a dedicated unit, an FPGA might still be your best bet,
if you have the skills (VHDL or Verilog). Alternatively, many faster
microcontrollers can directly generate video using nothing but
software.
But you're going to need a fair level of detail on what actually goes
on over those 12 lines before you can get something going. To that
end, why not post a note to this guy:
http://cncfanuc.blogspot.com/2009/04/fanuc-ac-servo-drive-system-
failure.html
Who seems to have a lot of information on his hands?
Best of luck,
Chuck