Actually what you mentioned is the best way of doing this. Having said that, the obstacle has been how do you get a long program into the CNC. I have installed SUPER floppy drives in place of the regular floppy. These act similar to a ZIP drive. I have put in parallel port zip drives. I have even installed a CDROM (laying it inside the cabinet on a TC-22. But I have a lot of mold shops that have installed LAN cards in their machines running WIN 3.11 for workgroups. This seems to work best allowing fast transfer of large programs and they DNC from the hard drive inside the machine. Remember that these machines run on DOS 6.20 and there was an option sold by BPT that included solid modeling and win 3.1. Never has anything newer been offered. So do not try running XP, 2000, 98 or 95 on these machines. BPT does not support this. Notice (again) that the LAN cards are running Win 3.11 for workgroups.
George W. |