• brokenlcd
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    10 months ago

    Last week i had to fix a cut and bend machine of that kind ( essentially it cuts steel sheets to a specific lenght with a guillotine and bends it into shape with an hydraulic press); it was originally just a cutter and the bending half was added afterwards: the cutter with the HID ran on a 486 board with a dos clone and was connected to the bender’s controller board via an isa card; i checked the bender’s board and it turned out to be a 6502 board… Talk about ol’reliable. I ended up needing to replace the 486 board with a pentium board( thankfully there are “industrial” boards with isa slots still made for older pentiums) and running everything trough freedos because someone slammed the steel sheets in the control cabin while feeding them in the machine. I was surpised to find a 6502 based embedded computer running with equipment that came standard with a flat panel monitor for the HID, but i guess when the machine’s minimum lifespan is marked in decades you go for well tested stuff.

    I am still resisting the temptation to go back there, dump the roms and reverse engineer the whole thing though