Memory upgrade

Jerry:

Have you given consideration to DNC'ing? Our Makino had/has a memory deficiency. We bought thousands of dollars worth of memory but it's sometimes still not enough for long 3D surfacing jobs. So what we did was dedicate an obsolete computer just for DNC'ing to that machine when needed.

Yep....bob's got a great point. But I would add you need a cache, battery backed up. Reason is power outage. But... Another good thing is BTR. Behind the tape reader I think is what it stands for. basically its hooking a floppy drive up to simulae dnc. It rocks. A floppy can hold 1.4 meg of code. if you remove things like line numbers thats a lot of code. Sometimes you can split the cut between 3-4 floppies, not really very hard to do these days.

Most btr's are cheap, 2-300$ item usually. memory on those machines on the other hand is like a million dollars a meg.

We have a haas minimill with 1 meg of ram. Sounds like a lot, but...it uses 700 meg to run. Then if you have a probe like us theres another 100k of macros. Then there's the programs like warmup...engraving, etc... that you leave in all the time. Not much left at all.

I say this over and over, when considering buying any machine, memory is the number one I thing I recommend to the owners. I can make a shitty mill hold tenths, but not if I have to run on less memory than is in my head.

If you go the route of dnc, buy a made cable from a good place. make sure the cable is as short as possible. Keep the cable from wrapping over itself. Don't use solid wire, it doesnt bend very well. Keep the cable at least a foot away from any power sources. And crank up the speed as high as your machine can go.

Thanks guys. How difficult is it to hook up that floppy drive? Sounds like it could be the easiest way. Jerry

Tried to answer this last night but my Giganews account seems to not be posting...

Take a look a Spectrum's WiPak.

It's a mini pc that mounts inside your machines box. You might need a BTR for data as well but these thing are the bomb for older controls. They're priced good and the support is awesome.

-- Bill

Close enough to the $1mil/meg already mentioned. goodgawd....

But, not bad, considering that fadal wants $1100 iffin yer floppy drive goes.

They don't just want you grabbing yer ankles, they want your head at yer ankles.

Re the dnc reference. I think we've had threads on free dnc.

Stephen, in the Trig Calc thread, mentioned microcimm, which also has dnc stuff, and looks like they'll put it all together, answer Qs. Not free, but not grabbing-yer-ankles.

Never ever say a Yasnac but

sells memory upgrades and is also a decent reference for backing up Fanuc controls.

Wes

1 meg of memory $1300. It is a daughter board with installation instructions.

Thanks

Wendell

Newssor Inc. snipped-for-privacy@newssor.com

Bob I think I will try to connect my laptop to the machine on Monday. Never tried it and have no idea how to do it. I use Gibbs communication to send programs. What do I use if I want to feed them live and how do I change my settings. Can you help me with that Jerry

Jerry wrote:

Jerry: This isn't always just a case of plug and go. Let me copy a post I make back in 2001.

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BottleBob Jul 27 2001, 3:02 pm

Newsgroups: alt.machines.cnc From: BottleBob Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 23:02:41 GMT Local: Fri, Jul 27 2001 3:02 pm Subject: Greg Mercurio of Shop Floor Automations Reply to author | Forward | Print | Individual message | Show original | Report this message | Find messages by this author

To All:

Here's the story, (for those that don't want to read all the boring details you can skip to the Summary). We needed to run a 3 axis surfacing job in one of our Fadals that has only 43k memory because the Haas with a bazillion megabytes (really only

16 I suppose) was needed for another 3 jobs. So I contacted Predator Software to see about getting some DNC software, they referred me to Shop Floor Automations in San Diego as being the dealer closest. I dealt with a woman named Amy and we decided that one seat of DNC software to be used on one machine at a time would be the most economical for us, we could upgrade later if need be. The software came soon after and I immediately had trouble since it wouldn't accept the serial and access numbers that were sent from the main office. Amy got me the correct numbers so that was no longer a problem. I read the little booklet that came with the software (WITH a dongle, I might add), I went through the directions step by step but it didn't work. I called Predator asking for their "faxed set-up sheet" for Fadal that was listed in the booklet. It came the next day, I went through it but there still were things that weren't clear plus it still wouldn't work. I called Predator and asked for tech support and was helped by Tim or John (sorry, I'm not big on remembering names), anyway he stepped me through everything I already had tried plus some other things I didn't try, all to no avail. He then referred me to Greg Mercurio (I had seen his name in posts to this group but up to this time I didn't know he was associated with Predator software - if it's not something directly relating to me spam just goes right by me). Greg patiently spent quite awhile stepping me through the software and the settings but the end result was that everything we tried didn't work. He then thought the problem might be associated with the the cabling (we have an inhouse devised switch board type set-up so any of 4 computers can connect to any of 5 CNC's), so he suggested sending a cable that he KNEW was correct. Seemed like a good idea to me. The cable came next day delivery (at Greg's own expense I might add), trick cable with exchangeable ends, I tried it but still no go. I had to spend that day getting a job running for the night shift so couldn't futz around with the DNC stuff. Today, Friday (my normal day off) I went to the shop to try and work this out. I called Fadal to see how much a memory upgrade to 4 megabytes would be - they told me $1,100, that was just in case we had to go that route. Greg called right after I got off the phone to Fadal. He had called Fadal the day before and got some information from them about why Predator wasn't working with the various settings we tried. First there seemed to be a problem with using, or not using Xmodem, our machines are all set-up to transfer data from the PC's at 38,400 and because of the way the Fadal controls are set up they can only use 19,200 baud for DNCing, something like that. Greg spent another 1 1/2 - 2 hours patiently trying different things. Also when I told him we never download programs from the machine to the PC he then had a major clue as to why what we were trying wasn't working. The troubleshooting we were doing was predicated on transferring files from the machine to the PC. There are some parameters in the Fadal control that haven't been set for file transfer Fadal-PC since we don't use that feature, if we had been using that feature the program would have probably worked right out of the box without any tech support needed. We tried setting the baud to 19,200 but the DNC command wasn't working like it should on that particular Fadal. Greg called Fadal and had one of their tech guys call me. That conversation didn't accomplish much. I tried DNCing to one of the other Fadals and I finally got it to work with the settings that Greg gave me. Then after futzing with the original Fadal I got THAT one to work as well. Hallelujah, we're rolling now! A short list of other things that have to be done to a file to be DNC'd to the Fadals are: No "O" word in program. No subs in program. No comments in program. These are all easily taken care of by the Predator Editor that comes with the DNC software. (Actually in our case Gibbs has the option of removing or inserting subs and comments leaving the Predator Editor to just remove the "O" word in the title) The machine is probably making parts by DNCing right now as I write this from home.

Summary: Greg spent a lot of time, effort, (and don't forget the cable expense ) supporting the software he sells and getting us up and running even to the point of calling Fadal to research for pertinent information. I wouldn't hesitate to buy something from him again. (He didn't even know it was me - BottleBob - until after he spent probably hours of help), he could have just flaked off and blamed me, the Fadal control, the computer, etc. but he didn't - he tried solving the problem and eventually succeeded. Thanks Greg, you're one of the good guys in my book. ====================================================================

Thanks Bob. After reading your story I think I just let our boss play with it. I know if I spent so much time on it he would not like it and possibly suspect it was my fault. Jerry

I hear DAT. I'da fired myself many times.... Show him BB's post -- should wake yer boss up.

Check out the WiPak from Spectrum.

Way more bang for the buck than just adding $$$ memory. Last I checked the unit is somwhere between $1-2K. You can even add a keyboard, and monitor to run it as a standard pc at the machine. Very cool. We've been looking into getting a few for our old Bosto's.

-- Bill

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