offsets get wipe out of memory

[jguerrera]

I just had my offset page get wiped out clean. My operator came in and said the machine is over traveling in the X direction. My first thought was the offset information was not present and I was correct. I have had this happen a couple of times. Once because I loaded a new CBK file and there was no active offsets in the file when I loaded it. The other time this happened I never was able to find out why the offset page became blank. This happened while the machine was running production. The control was powered down for some general machine repair and when the control was powered back up I had the problem with the X axis over traveling. That is when I noticed the offset page was blank. I don't know why this happened I never restored any CBK files. Now it looks like this problem is back. Any thought why this might happen.

[Karl_T]

Your offset data is stored in a plain text file. tool.fil

You keep backups don't you? Just replace this file. Otherwise you just "learnt the hard way". Backup your computer. There are also other similar files for tool decriptions etc. if you use them.

Karl

[HuFlungDung]

I've never seen the offsets disappear, even when the controller has crashed.

For them to all 'disappear' makes me think that the tool.fil got corrupted somehow, so then camsoft just started up a new one as it loaded itself into memory.

Maybe run some sort of memory checking utility to see how good and reliable your PC memory is.

[Karl_T]

The least reliable part of a Camsoft control is the personal computer. And the most vulnerable part of the PC is the hard disk. I reccomend these steps for all PC based machine controls.

1. Always have two hard disks in the computer. When the control is working correctly, clone the working hard drive to the other. In the event of a disk crash, all that needs to be done is change the boot disk in the computer CMOS setup.

FWIW, I also have an entire spare computer with Galil and IO cards sitting on the shelf ready to go. If the computer is suspected, an entire brain transplant can be performed in minutes.

2. Backup your machine setup files EVERY DAY! Takes second to backup, hours or days to recover.

I found a cryptic DOS command years ago that will copy any file into a directory for each month and day. Just run this command daily by clicking on the batch file icon and you end up with a backup in a directory tree by month by day.

Here's four comand lines that you can place in a .bat file to backup your .cbk and .fil files to both a C: and a D: drive.

xcopy c:\AS3000\cnc\*.cbk c:\CamsoftBackups\%date:~-4,4%\%date:~-10,2%\%date:~-7,2% /I /Y /C /V

xcopy c:\AS3000\cnc\*.fil c:\CamsoftBackups\%date:~-4,4%\%date:~-10,2%\%date:~-7,2% /I /Y /C /V

xcopy c:\AS3000\cnc\*.cbk d:\CamsoftBackups\%date:~-4,4%\%date:~-10,2%\%date:~-7,2% /I /Y /C /V

xcopy c:\AS3000\cnc\*.fil d:\CamsoftBackups\%date:~-4,4%\%date:~-10,2%\%date:~-7,2% /I /Y /C /V