More Conect Machinery

Hi folks,
I spent many years in school using a Conect lathe and Mills. Using the old DOS software, as well as many A level projects, we built from scratch four wheel drive/four wheel steer/independant suspension radio control cars. With these we won the Silverstone formula schools engineering prize twice. I say this just to indicate that some schools actually did try to do engineering properly! I am now retired and on returning to my old school found two mills and a lathe languishing unused under a bench - apparently the school had "updated". I made an offer and bought the machines for a song.
When I got them home I found all the old conect electronics had been removed and replaced with cards from Conqueror. I couldn't get any of the machines to function with the new boards. They are serial input - my question is: is there such a thing as a parallel to serial board I could build or buy to use Mach3 with these excellent little machines? Ray

hi and welcome

Let us know what the model of board are in the machines. As much info as possible really and .

Hi, thanks for reply. The initial board is a Conqueror MPC 5 which appears to control the original Ash boards. The initial cable is a serial with: 2, RCD; 3, TXD; 5, Ground (7, RTS and 8, CTS are not joined - could be wrong cable). Mach 3 uses parallel ports, my electronics aren't good enough to know if a parallel to serial conversion is possible (although I can etch and make up any board). Thanks, Ray

The Conquerer MPC5 card is indeed a serial card with its own onboard controller to interpret the conmmand stream from Eaziform's EasyCNC software. It will not be possible to use this with MACH3 (there are several threads on CNCZone about this). EasiCNC software is well thought of apparently, but it costs - you should download a trial from their site and see if it suits your needs. If you want to use MACH3 you will need to gut the MD5 and Ash cards and replace with new stepper drivers (and probably new steppers too)

Thanks for that info. I have the EasiCNC software that was with the machines. The latest version I notice is passworded to the first machine it is installed on (initial key generated by that computer's hardware and passworded by Conqueror). My older version seems to work on any computer. I've got a couple of weeks to play - I'll let you know how I get on! Thanks again. Ray

That was easy lol!