I've found the user group to be extremely helpful on old equipment
questions, and this was the case here. There were both suggestions as well
as requests for useful results.
Based on all responses, it seems that the Quickbasic program (ND60 and
variants)that sent commands to the ISA motion control board has fallen into
total (and probably deserved)oblivion. There were three kinds of proposed
fixes:
1. Reverse engineering--intercepting commands to the motion control board
and figuring out necessary basic commands, to be used in a new user-written
program.
2. Someone else had a problem with motion control components of this
vintage and suggested that the ISA board might only work properly in a
computer with clock speeds of that vintage (probably 6 MHz or less). I
had "upgraded" to an old 100 MHz Pentium 1, so that could be the problem;
the boards originally came in a PC-XT (8086 based). I am now patrolling
the area around the dumpster of our building in hopes of finding an
appropriate computer.
3. Multiple people have encountered a similar problem in old dye lasers
and have implemented the same solution: Rip out the old scan motors and
electronics, leading to a bare lead screw on the grating. At this point
put in and couple to the lead screw a new stepper motor (possible to use
some old components). It would be possible to get adequate (bare bones)
control simply by counting pulses applied to the motor driver board.
Alternatively, a more expensive motion control package, including stepper
motor with documented scan control firmware, could be installed, and a
rather versatile scan control routines could be written.
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