long term reliablity computer boards

Study it, learn from it, or pay the consequences. Leaving some modern electronics on 24/7 destroys it in short order. Long gone are the tube days when you could put a couple fingers between components

Dream on. Better yet, rent a power analyzer and look at the AC line for a few weeks. You will never see a pure sine wave. Some days you'll barely recognize that it is supposed to be a sine wave.

They aren't that hard to replace, if you know how. I've replaced thousands of them on PTH boards. SMD boards are easy. The hard part is buying good low ESR capacitors. Newer motherboards are starting to use organic electrolytics that are supposed to last longer & work better. I can desolder the six to ten electrolytics on most motherboards in under an hour without damaging the PTHs or traces. Soldering them back is easier, but you do have to take ESD precautions.

Do those old machines have gun drilled, liquid cooled ballscrews? Spindle oil coolers? Have you entered pitch error compensation tables from the ballscrew manufacturer?

Depends... I had some old XTs that just would not die. I still have drives out of some of them as working spares, and I have one "all media" computer that has some of those original XT floppy drives running today.

The real success story though is a 486 DX 80 that I bought 1st gen and threw in an old 386 cabinet. I ran that machine 24/7 more than a decade with no failures of anything. Drives, memory, processors, etc. In fact I think one of the floppy drives in it is from one of my 386 machines. The last 3 years I only power it up when I need it a couple times a week, but it still boots right up and runs like a champ. Only reason I shut it down now is that it has a nsiy power supply fan that drives me crazy. Can't complain. That power supply came with the cabinet, and my wife had that computer before we met. It was totally state of the art back then. LOL.

I have not had that luck with any computer newer than that however. Boards fail, memory fails, processors get flaky, drives fail, etc etc... However, I have managed to keep a lot of them going in a pinch just by slowing them down. Its kind of a shame that its not that easy with a modern BIOS.

I've seen a BUNCH of file servers consistantly run 4 to 5 years without failure. The PC I'm on now has been on for some 3 year now, and another in the office more than 5. I also had my first Accurite II on a digital mill go better than 25 years.

I will grant you your expertise, but I can assure you, my actual experiences have shown quite different.

Everyone knows computers and electric motors are anything but partners on the shop grid. If you can about your computers, battery back up power supplies make good low cost filters. Not perfect, but many times better than nothing at all.

Good to know, I should be able to hire somebody to help when the time comes. Is there a way to know caps are failing? Or, wait till it broke and try this fix?

Karl

Galil is good stuff. Almost two decades ago, I was using some Galil 720's to lay down hotmelt adhesive before turning the carpet on package trays. Made for a fairly inexpensive servo system that got the job done. During those days, Doctor Tal was responding personally to my bug reports. (yup, I found a few) New rom's came quickly. Not sure how support is now.

I'm sure Doctor Tal's products have improved immensely. Btw, he put out a couple books that were very interesting concerning motion systems. I was going to give you the titles but I seemed to have moved them to another bookcase or boxed them. Only so much room.

Back to your original question, I'd shop goodwill stores and pick up boxes that meet your needs now. We have a balancer that has a 8087 in it. You know how old that is, like 86 or so. That board has been rocking on for 2 decades. Short of a bad lightning strike, most motherboards will last > 10 years. So 4 spares are likely going last you as long as you are interested in the technology level you are using. Cheap PCI or whatever available Galils will be on the market when your supply dries up.

Wes

Karl,

UMMM look back 20 or 30 years, when was the last time you saw a 8080 CP/M computer....

I'd seriously think about this statment you made...

I haven't seen a *NEW* 3.5 floopy drive in several years though someone

PATA hard disks (you know connected by the wide flat cable) are NO LONGER MANUFACTURED... It's all SATA now (that skinny red cable)

FYI just to blow your mind, in the SATA world it's getting tough (at the OEM manufacturing level) to buy a SATA drive SMALLER than 750GB and as of last week the quotes a customer of mine got had 1TB (yes that's TERABYTE) drives at a lower cost than 750GB...

Good luck pal...

--.- Dave

A few episodes back, Steve Gibson was talking about his collection of PDP's. One of the issues with firing them up was the capacitors. Some caps can be reformed.

Wes

Oh yeah one other thing..

What's usually the death of most electronics is the capacitors... the Cap manufactures have tuned the manufacturing process so close to the bone that if you get 5 years outts some that good... the also don't age well even un powered.. so sticking a bunch of boards away as spares will only get you so far..

Get with the program and to paraphrase Walt Disney "just keep moving forward"..

--.- Dave

If you care to keep the machine running and making money, ease of setup is a big deal.

The lack of a derivative term in the loop is not merely a one-time convenience issue. It can have a big impact on positioning performance, and may be more important on an older machine where the control may be called on to compensate for some of the machine's shortcomings.

I don't consider an obsolete motion controller to be a Ferrari, and don't see the point in replacing something that's up and running and familiar with a system that has less functionality.

He was still answering the phone occasionally as of a couple years ago, but I think you're more likely to get him with an application question than a support request. My first experience with Galil was also with the 7xx series.

One of the best things about Galil is no matter how much the products evolve, the stuff you learned remains relevant. The controllers still use the same syntax and two letter mnemonic commands that I first learned.

The motherboard i use takes a WIDE range of P4 processors. Would it be wise to buy a few slower ones to swap in a failing unit?

Karl

That makes sense.

Floppy drives are becoming quite rare already. I'm amazed that my Sun Blade 2000 still has one -- not all of them do.

Hard drives keep getting bigger, and older BIOS chips and motherboards have limits on the largest disk drive which they can boot from and use in their entirity. I would suggest stocking drives of the maximum size that the motherboard is happy with *now*.

If the power supply used by the motherboards is the ATX style, you may be able to get them for a while yet. If the older style used by the PC, XT and AT -- get them *now* at hamfests and flea markets -- or be prepared to troubleshoot switching mode power supplies *without* schematics. (I have yet to find a set of schematics for a PC power supply.)

Get at least two CPU fan/heat-sinks for each system board. The fans in those tend to fail sooner than most other parts. (And they

Make sure that you use the same size memory in all systems, and you should be able to mix and match to keep enough working sets from a full set for each working motherboard and spare motherboard.

You can probably use current production graphics cards for a while at least. Probably you can stock up from discarded cards as the gamers keep upgrading to faster and hotter cards.

But you know, of course, that the thing most likely to fail will be the special cards which are forcing you to need the ISA bus to start with. And those are the most expensive parts too, I'll bet.

For power supplies, and motherboards, you might be able to keep things running with spare capacitors. (Remember that for a period a lot of things were made using capacitors with an electrolyte built from a stolen (and bad) formula, so the filter caps may be the most likely non-mechanical part to fail.) If you can replace filter caps on the motherboards and the power supplies, you might be able to keep them going longer.

Good Luck, DoN.

IDE HDD's are still readily available , checked Newegg recently ?

-- Snag every answer leads to another question

I can testify the support is top shelf. If you got an interesting problem, they move you right up to the senior engineering staff, great folks. Wish there were more companies that believed in top notch products and support like Galil.

Karl

They tend to last longer if powered up but fail if stored a long time. Martin - I have a digital clock I made in the mid 70's - I figured the IC would go bad by now - not the main clock one - ceramic/gold but the segment drivers. Looks like a segment or two are getting weak. Might be IC or solder joint.

Amazing really. Some electronics just last and last. Some leak and moisture gets you.

Mart> cavelamb wrote:

Till all the old stock is gone..

Read my post again, NO LONGER MANUFACTURED...

Sure Newegg et-all will sell ya "new old stock" till it's depleted... but they ain't making em any more.. case closed...

Trust me "SeeCrate" and "EasternAnalog" closed the PATA lines a year ago...

--.- Dave

Well, then you really NEED to see EMC2. I have been doing rigid tapping on my minimill (too hard to fit a spindle encoder to a Bridgeport 1J head) for over a year now. I used to use a spring-loaded tap holder, but now I just put it in a Jacobs chuck and it works fine.

We have Hardinge CHNC users and a few other lathes doing threading. I also have done threading in my minimill, primarily for testing purposes. We don't have all of the above in one canned cycle at the present, but have a G-code program that does it all with some loops and variables.

Check out MachMotion, but their stuff is plenty expensive. As for EMC2, once you have a decent amount of I/O, adding a nice jog pendant is pretty easy.

(If you don't know where to find EMC2, see

Jon