EZ Trak DX2 Voltage Conversion

[machintek]

The original BMDCs were socketed chip carriers and yes, they saved money by configuring a board for the application. I have a cheat sheet of all the part numbers, clock speeds, and configurations.
There was even a BMDC4.
My apology, I meant to say 1 cable or 2. 1 cable was power and tach only. The 2nd cable was for the encoder.
The newer motor used the linear scale when in 2 axis mode and the rotary Z encoder when in 3 axis mode.
I believe you are sucking big wind with your older 3 axis stye machine. I know of many shops that have thrown that away and purchsed the newer style with the Z ballscrew right in front of the quill housing. Still limited to drilling with a 3/8 drill in mild steel.


George

[machintek]

Here is my BMDC cheat sheet.

George

[drminpa]

Could someone please post these - having trouble working out where the bug is in getting my BPT EZTrak SX (ugraded to DX2) running.

Thanks.

[machintek]

Please give symptoms.
The first difference between a SX and a DX was a better mother board and a hard drive. Some of the older SX machines did not like newer software. I usually draw the line on the older machines with ver 3.02.

George

[drminpa]

I found the problem - the mother board on my machine died and I replaced it with one from a old compaq presario computer I had in the attic. Apparently I didn't push the 50 pin cable from the AUXBOB board to the BMDC on all the way - guess I qualify for tri-focals now. Thanks anyway. Machine seems to work fine but I think the software version I have may be from the older SX model - the screens don't match the ones in the programmers manual I have (manual is labled DX-32). Is there any place I can down load either an SX programers manual or DX-32 software?

[machintek]

The EZtrak software had a BMDC.bin file that loaded to the BMDC. Typically for newer software a newer BMDC is necessary to have the chips to run the newer bells and whistles. Every version of software was a little bit different with items moving around on a page or to a different page. Some canned functions may have more choices, etc so there is no book that will precisely fit a piece of software.
I do not know where you can download EZTRAK software as most wirewalls now look inside .zip files and stop all the executables. I have almost every version Bridgeport put out but stopped emailing them to my service techs as it never come out OK at the other end. Example (before firewalls), I would email a disk. It was zipped by AOL and when unzipped, it filled 3 floppys as all the files unzipped including the ones that were supposed to stay zipped on the install disk. I worked around this by sending my techs a diskcloner software. I could create an image, email it and they could create an exact copy of the original disk using that piece of software.
The OS also went through a evolution. Bridgeport settled on DOS 6.20 and the later versions were based on this version.
What is the part number of your BMDC? What version of DOS and trak software are you using?

George

[drminpa]

The board has printed on it:
BMDC2
FAB1942937
ASM1942938

It also has stamped in black ink 1942967

The DOS version is 6.2

I think the BPT software version is 6.00 but it flies by so fast I didn't get to confirm that (shut down re-started twice to read it). If you need it closer than 6.0X, I can try again.

Hope I have the numbers you need posted here.

Thanks for your help.

[NC Cams]

Something to watch out for on motherboard changes:

We, too, installed a new M/B in our EZTRAK. We didn't know that the 'Trak software was NOT able to deal with LBA (large block access) capabilities found on newer M/B's. This feature is optionally set in the BIOS.

Result: the computer would put stuff on the hard drive that the 'Trak software couldn't find. This led to repeatability and all sorts of other irritating problems. You also need to set the BIOS to write the cache before exiting. This too causes problems with X=0 and Y=0 and Z=0 resets not being saved if you do NOT write the cache before shutting down.

We learned that the 'Trak software was written when hard drives were small and capabilities limited for DOS. Thus, you can't get too fancy when you try to use newer M/B's and all the other features of DOS. We also learned that you also can't load a huge aftermarket drive and expect the software to be able to use/access all of it.

We even tried to load Dosshell and run the 'Trak software out of 'shell - this being done to enable easier file maintenance. Don't even try to do that!!!!.

If you simply load and run the 'Trak sofware as-is, the thing will run fine. You can load Dosshell or other programs for disk maintenance (IE: Xtree, etc) but you have to exit from 'Trak via the utilities screen, do your thing with these program and then restart trak (we simply execute AUTOEXEC.bat from a C:\ screen or via dosshell.

Hint: install a DOM (disk on module) instead of a hard drive. Much more robust and dare I say convenient than a hard drive. Contact BPT Machine in Carol Streak IL for one (I am not affiliated in any with with BPT - he did a service trip to me and I had to pay just like the next guy).

After doing so, our machine runs like a champ whareas we were ready to can it or use it as merely a drill press...