Hey, I have a centroid m-400 control on my little bedmill and have a
couple of questions.

1. What are the keystrokes to get to the C:/ prompt
from the main screen level? I had done this before but failed
to write them down.

2. I'm trying to set up communication between my offline computer
and the centroid control via the ethernet connection but I cant
get my computer to see the mill control.

Thanks in advance

Have you tried control+break? I have an older pc based system that uses this.
Al

ValleyFab,

Hello. To enter DOS from the main screen of CNC7, press <ctrl><alt><x>.

For assistance setting up your control for networking, contact your dealer and he will be glad to help you out.

Thank you both for the quick responce.

AjaxCNC, thank you for the keystroke information, it worked great. My dealer is out of business, do you have any other suggestions?

http://www.atkinsontechnologies.com

Centroid dealer, repair, retrfitter...

ctrl-alt-x is correct

as for networking it, dont call up a tech support company for your problem. there is a much much much easier way to do it. install windows 98. yup very easy and works well. people will tell you not to do it because it might mess up your controller, I know a shop with 17 m400's, and every one of them has windows on it and they all work just fine. the only problem i've ever seen with the m400 is overheating, but that was solved by adding another fan into the mix and now everything is fine.

hope this helps you out

forgot to mention the easiest way to do this. pull the back off the m400 control, attatch a cd-rom ghetto style and either install 98 via cd rom or a way i like to do it because you end up disconnecting the cd rom is to just copy all the 98 files over to a directory called "98install" or something similar and run the setup from there.


good luck

how does the win 98 work on m400 controls without a hard drive. Mine has a compact flash card which is 128 mb

thanks
bill

sorry for the delay in response. to be honest i dont know, i've always used ones with hd's. anyway if it does not have one it would not be hard at all to install one in there and put 98 on it. personally that is what i would do since hd's are pretty cheap any more. if you have any questions or anything or i wasn't specific enough on what would be an easy solution let me know.

gl

I want to be able to push a file from a remote pc to the centroid 400 control. Via cable connected to the comport. Does anyone know how to do this. I don't have a network card installed and I don't want to add any additional software to the control.

MrTrim: the only thing i've seen similar to that is dnc max and you would still need a network port. one thing though i've never seen a centroid 400 based motherboard that didn't have a nic built in. you may want to do a little digging and see if they just hid it or were sneaky about something.

do you run the centroid software from inside win98 or do you exit win 98 to dos to load the centroid software?

The Centroid software runs outside of Windows in DOS. On a typical setup, the computer boots straight to the CNC software and not Windows. The CNC software must be exited before Windows starts up.

I've seen many setups where the software is running inside of windows 98, yeah i know technically 98 is still a dos based system and all sorts of arguements can be made both ways. but if you get down to it, if you just boot into 98 and run the software from there it works fine.