Hacking a Roland CAMM3 PNC-3000

[Robin Hewitt]

Hacking a Roland CAMM3 PNC-3000 just about sums it up...

I got it for the look and it has passed wife inspection for home office use (provided it doesn't make a mess). Good idea for cold weather if you can get away with it

It's a small 3 axis mill with ball screws resolving 5um, round linear rails and a robust cast aluminium frame of average section about 1cm. It's also a bit of a dinosaur :naughty:

Good thing is you can download all the circuit diagrams, meaning you can copy it's EPROM's and make sense of them with a Zilog disassembler. It's got a Z80

I have a new proto BIOS written so I can upload new code and run it in RAM. Much easier than blowing zillions of EPROMS. All looks pretty straight forwards. Have you discovered Dosbox? It's a freeby that lets you run antique software under XP, Win7 and, amazingly, it all works. Nominate a directory containing all your DOS favourites, mount it as a disk drive under Dosbox and away you go. Google for dosbox if you want it.

Mechanically I need splash guards to comply with wifely edict. I also want to hush it up a bit. The brushed AC motor isn't too bad but DC would be quieter and I could slow it down a lot, it's much to fast. I'm fitting an ER16 spindle at the same time because Roland collets leave a bit to be desired.

Pic 1: Spindle out, motor out, new ER16 spindle waiting to go in.