That controller is a bit older, but I believe we still use the same drives. Since we are doing a trade in program for folks upgrading from Mach to Centroid we are breaking down old controllers.
No guarantee but we might be able to sell just some ESS upgrade parts to replace what you have.
After this week you could get in touch with support if you wanted.
If you wanted to roll your own we have schematics published for that control. It’s a pretty straight ahead stepper system so retrofitting it with something else would be pretty easy.
I did my first retrofit from ESS to centroid and it was pretty easy. ( this was before we had our new controls out )
Sounds like you got a great deal on that machine! The kit I made only replaces 2 of the 3 ports on the ESS, it won’t work for a machine with a plasma add-on. Also, that break out board does not match the one I have so I can’t guarantee that it would work for you. If the pinout of the first 2 ports is the same it should. There are custom ribbon cables included that are required to make it work. If you are still interested I do still have one kit.
I ended up going with a Mesa 7C81, THCAD2, and a RasPi 5. I wanted to go with the 7I98 but they’re out of stock and I believe the raspi should be sufficient. Out of curiosity, what custom cables did you require? Just to get input and outputs to the right pins?
The breakout board supplies 5v on a few pins that would cause some problems. I don’t remember which ones off the top of my head. I also had to write a custom firmware to remap some of the FPGA IO to the right pins.