That's a great baseline. I do like to part things out. When I was a kid, I took a lot of my toys apart.
Karl, I had a huge discussion with a guy at Heidenhain USA today. He was there for 29 years. We spent 30 minutes talking and he gave me the complete skinny on Heidenhain controls, fate of the Bridgeport company, etc.
It is too much to repeat in a short post, but in his opinion, if I can just swap the display for LCD and that would fix the problem, it is the best course of action.
He told me do not buy a used CRT monitor. What he says is that after all these years, the monitors are flaky, but the rest of the control is good and reliable stuff.
The issue with the monitor is that the monitor is EGA, which is a completely obsolete standard by now. It is nothing really special, just an EGA monitor that fits the enclosure.
So really, any EGA monitor will work, and if I can find one that fits the enclosure nicely, it is a plus.
The Heidenhain guy told that it could be either a bad monitor or a bad graphics card. He explained me how I can test if the flyback transformer is working on the monitor and how I can narrow the problem down. Replacing the card is something that they do, but it is big bucks and moving to a PC based control makes perfect sense.
I fI can spend $300-400 and get a suitable EGA LCD monitor, I would rather do that.
I am totally intimidated by their size, and complexity, and cost, and weight, a Series II is as far as I can go.
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