Arrow 750 Com port trouble HELP !!!!

[overflowmachine]

Hey gang hope everyone is busy making chips. I have two Arrow 750's with 2100 controls. One of my machines has been giving me the finger in the form of a blue screen on power up. I have managed to get around it by shutting down and powering up again and it boots up fine. A few weeks ago this all changed and I began getting time out errors and other errors. I had some guys who sell new drives on Ebay Ed and Scott work up a new hard drive and send it out. ( These guys were great. I could not get a back up off the machine and had no disc's for it and they took my old drive and made a copy for me and I have a new drive in two days. More on this later ) I installed the new drive and we are back up and running. I did find out how ever that I also had a problem with my real time board. My other machine is down right now having the spindle cartridge rebuilt so I swapped out the board and that took care of it for now. Ed and Scott are going to take care of my R/T board as well. Here's my problem, I cant get the machine to take a program. I program everything in Master CAM and go out to my machines through a wireless network. I know it's the machine, I can send to six other machines in the shop no problem. It seems the machine can't see the port. It has a floppy drive but it's old and not working. All of my cnc Com's settings are the same. All I can think is it cant see the port. My other machine has an Icon on the system con-fig page that says windows com ports and when I open it it has Com 1 and Com2. This windows com port icon is not present in the machine with the new drive. The guy who is helping me out said it should not matter. I am going to try swapping out the work station board but short on time today. Just thought I would throw this out there and see if anyone has an answer. I cant be spending two hours MDI-ing programs into the machine. Thanks in advance.

Ron

[John_B]

I think your on the right path, it probably isn't seeing the port.

Do you not have the floppy drive though for file transfer? It can be a life saver - especially if you get one of the floppy to USB converter drives...

[overflowmachine]

John
Thanks, I do have a floppy drive but not sure if it's working. I think it is but we don't have a single CPU in the shop with a drive and I don't have any disc's. Man funny how times change I once had piles of them around. I was thinking of the floppy to usb converters. Were can you get them ? Do you own an Arrow ?

[John_B]

I got the USB Floppy Emulator from Shop Floor Automation (Floppy Emulators Hardware - Shop Floor Automations), but I understand from some others that the one sold by Ipcas in Germany is better (ipcas GmbH - USB Floppy Emulator: use USB-Stick as floppy und replace 100 floppys with USB-Stick (FDD to UDD)).

I do have an Arrow 1000, but I have it hooked up to the computer network with a ethernet card.

[overflowmachine]

John Thanks for all the help. I am going to do this. I would also like to try an Ethernet card how do you set that up ? is it a standard off the shelf card ? I think the guy who did the hard drive over has not done something correctly. I go to sys con fig and the windows Com port icon is gone. On my other machine if I open this icon it has two ports listed Com 1 and Com 2 I think this is the problem but the guy who made the new drive says it has nothing to do with it. I'm going crazy with this and cant be spending hours MDI-ing in programs. I have been without the machine for three weeks now and it's killing me

[mallardfizz]

hello if you send me the software details from both of your machines i'll try to help. please send it via my e-mail mallardfizz@hotmail.co.uk
you will find the details by
pressing MORE
pressing SYSTEM
I need the MAI details in the top box and what release NCX and SYSTEM in the middle and bottom box.
regards
mallardfizz

[coop31]

When I bought my Arrow 750 it did not have a network card. I purchased a lot of 4 ISA cards from ebay for $10. Installed just fine. Might be your easiest way to go?

[maver1ck]

Since Serial communication requires a COM port, if your control doesn’t recognize that there is a COM port on the machine, you won’t be able to set up the communication protocols, so it won’t work. Based on what you wrote, not sure if you were saying you don’t have any COM port listed, or if it just didn’t have COM1 and COM2 (you don’t need both).

Since you said your serial communication worked before you put the new hard drive in, it doesn't work with the new hard drive, but all of your other machines still work, it is obviously specific to the machine, but not necessarily the Hard drive (although that is the most likely thing I can think of). I don't know the people you bought the hard drive from, but presumably all they are doing is making an illegal copy of Windows and the A2100 software on a hard drive from their machine and selling it to you. Siemens has pursued legal action against other companies for doing this, so will probably put a stop to it once they find out. However, that said, you have a copy of their hard drive and its settings, not yours. If the original hard drive they copied did not have the COM port set up, neither will yours.

Floppy not working could be many things, but since you indicated you also lost your WS board settings, it could be as simple as the WS BIOS has the floppy drive disabled, or you didn’t plug the floppy connector back in properly when the WS board was removed.