Depending on what voltage is used in your control would depend on the best way to proceed. The limits and home switches seem to be 24V which is good for noise imunity and is what I have but if the 24V carries on out of that board then you would need to convert it to 5V before you hooked it  up to your computer. I am busy working out how I am going to fit the spindle motor to my lathe at the moment but I will have a better look through the docs later on and see if I can gather any clues, in the mean time if you know what voltage comes out of the connector let us know.
Hood

Hood,
       I am thinking that the voltage that goes to the DSP controller is only 5V. The reason I say this is that I can hook it up to my computer using the supplied cable and a PCI SCSI controller board. I will try to check this later on today.

Chip.
     What do you mean by "Tracing the existing Interface boards 50 pin connector"? I am not electrically savvy at all. I may be able to get a local shop to make me a cable.

Martyn.

if its 5v then thats great as all you will have to do is as Chip says which is trace which pin on the 50 connector is for what. It might be in the docs, not seen it so far but not had a real good look yet.
Hood

Hi guys,
         just to show what we are looking at, here are some photos of the controls.

Martyn.

And a couple more.

From what I have found so far, I cannot get a 50pin SCSI to a 25 pin parallel cable. So that option is not looking too good. If I was to go with a breakout board what would I be looking at?

Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

Martyn.

Martyn
 The SCSI to PP wouldnt work anyway, what you will need to do is hack up a SCSI cable and sperate all of the pins then possibly put them into one but more likely two Parallel ports or maybe a SmoothStepper would be a better option. First you need to figure out which pin does what then you will know how many Inputs there are and how many OutPuts.
 I have not had a chance to look again as I have just got home from the workshop, have a few drawings to do and then I will have a proper look at the docs you posted to see if there are any hints there.

Hood

Hood,
       having absolutely no experience in that, I would be a little nervous in trying. I am beginning to wonder if it would be easier and less stressful to replace the board completely. Given my lack of experience it may be a little more expensive but safer in the long run. What do you think?

Martyn.

Replacing the board would be easy enough to do but there would be a few things you would have to address one of which is the limits and home switches require 24V. That in itself is a good thing and it is what I power my limits etc with, in fact all of my I/O are 24v with the exception of the Step/Dir signals. To use the 24V you need to drop it down to 5 just before it goes to the computer (or breakout) you can do this with relays etc. If however your board already does that then it would probably be the simplest solution to keep it and just find out which wire is which.
 I have just printed out your docs and am away to have a look.

Hood

Martyn,
 There is no info regarding which pin is which of the SCSI so you would need try and trace them with a meter.
 If you decided to go the Breakout board route it would be fairly straightforward  to do with the exception of the spindle speed control as at the moment it seems to require 24V. If you have a manual for the VFD (Inverter or as they call it Inventor) then we may find it can use 5V or 10V which I think most of the speed controllers sold for Mach use.
 The only other problem would be converting the 24V from the Home switches to 5V but a simple relay for each would do that.
 Do you have the touch plate ?(CAD feature as they call it)
 Oh and your pendant, not sure how that interfaces, do you have any info on that?
Hood