Long Program problem

[Colin]

Hi
I am running CNC Professional on our Cincinnati machining centre. I am trying to run a long 3-D program and it runs for about 20 minutes, then starts to stutter, waiting a few seconds between lines, then finally stops. It is almost like it is putting the lines away somewhere, starts to find it difficult where to put them and finally fills up the space. Can anyone help please?

Colin

[HuFlungDung]

WAG: perhaps some of the power saving settings on your PC are turning on? Because the program is lengthy, you probably are not touching the keyboard, and Windows will want to begin to shut things down, so go into the power settings and force everything to be always on: monitor, hard drive on always, and turn off all sleep and hibernate settings. I'd do a reboot after changing these settings just to be sure the settings have changed.

[Karl_T]

Another shot in the dark for you...

We made custom belt buckles and had 1000's of lines in the Gcode. There was a section where the control got bogged down until I added the SMOOTH command. If the part where you're having troulbe has lots of very small moves, this could be the trouble.

Karl

[Colin]

Thanks Karl, but it did not fix it. The program starts to stop and start at about 8000 lines and stops completely at about 9000 lines. I could not run smooth on G64 as it came up with a FASTMODE error. But in G08 it went OK, but made no difference to the stopping. The code is generated in Mastercam, using a fanuc post.
I will try playing with the post and if all fails chop the program into blocks, but I would really like to know what is going on?

Colin

[camtd]

Maybe with with the other Camsoft folks you could email the file and do a dry run or something to eliminate that possibility.

[Colin]

Good thinking, if anyone wants to volunteer, give me an email address and I will do that.

Colin

[HuFlungDung]

Sounds like some kind of a buffer problem, but I don't know the why and how of its occurance.

Do you have a button (in your Camsoft GUI) made to inquire for an error code from the Galil card? I did this early on in my retrofit, because while the Galil card will sometimes stop with an error, you cannot see it easily when the Camsoft GUI is running, or you are running a program.

[Colin]

Thanks, I will look into that, but at this stage I have broken the program into 16 parts and running one after the other. Done the test, now machining the part.
Regards, Colin

[Colin]

I still need to get to the bottom of it though, for future long programs?

Colin

[Karl_T]

Do you have a button (in your Camsoft GUI) made to inquire for an error code from the Galil card? I did this early on in my retrofit, because while the Galil card will sometimes stop with an error, you cannot see it easily when the Camsoft GUI is running, or you are running a program.

I had real trouble with acceleration a while back... The following in TIMER.FIL put the value on screen. Do the same with SC (stop code) or any other value. To just get it on request put the code snip in an Mcode and attach to an on screen button.

Karl



*************this block displays acceleration********************

'COMMAND MG_ACA
'RESPONSE \55
'\55={INT(\55/100)}
'COMMAND MG_ACB
'RESPONSE \56
'\56={INT(\56/100)}
'LABEL3 \55 \56

[HuFlungDung]

If you have an available button you can put on screen, this could be a sample of the M-function logic to assign to that button. This command is inquiring "Tell Error Code", and the response, if any is displayed on top of the button itself (CNC Professional):
COMMAND TC
RESPONSE \14
BUTTON14 IN;\14;12
-----M14

Have you tried to contact Camsoft about this problem?

When you say the program stops, is there no indication of a problem on the computer, except that the machine sits motionless, and the Camsoft GUI keeps on running?

BTW, there are a fair number of restrictions about using the SMOOTH command that bear looking into. A standard post processor will most likely not obey the rules. For example, the way I read the documentation, you turn SMOOTH on at the beginning of a non-stop G01 sequence, but it must be turned off at the last line of the G01 and before a G00. If you have logic written in G08 and G09 to turn smooth on and off, you'll need to somehow incorporate that in your file. Also read about the BUFFER option in conjunction with the SMOOTH command.

I've not run Camsoft on a mill, only on a lathe, so I've never encountered a long program problem. I would hope there is some kind of solution to such a problem or there would be no practical benefit to using a high-powered motion controller on a PC.

[camsoft]

Colin,

Most likely the reason is not related to the G code program itself unless there are specific lines grouped together every 1/16th of the way in the program in which this will happen at. It also would not be related to buffering if you weren't using the SMOOTH, FASTMODE, BUFFER or SPLINE features plus that fact this happens with or without G8.

It's fairly common for our customers mold style programs to be very large. We ran programs almost as large as the hard disk drive in the past and routinely run an 8 meg G code program in FASTMODE in about 30 seconds for our training classes in the demo room.

As Huflungdung and Karl mentioned the same effect has been known to happen because of a Power Saver, Hibernate mode, Screen saver, Task scheduler or TIMER feature is enabled in control panel.

One of the guys said he may have some time this afternoon or else at your convenience to run the part on our servos if you wanted to zip up the G code program and send to us.

Tech Support
CamSoft Corp.
951-674-8100
support@camsoftcorp.com