Newbie- Sign Writing on a Biesse Rover 22 NC400 Controller

[Midnight Mayhem]

Hi
I'm Midnight Mayhem, and new to this site and to programing.
I sure hope i'm in the right place, if not please point me in the right direction.

I have a Biesse Rover 22 with a NC400 Controller pc based windows 98 point to point. From which i can tell the machine uses files with .PAN extentions

What i would like to do is make a few signs for myself, from jpeg or bmp files.
eg. BOSE, Marantz etc with coloured lights behind them. And some just engraved for my bar downstairs.

I wish to write the program at home on my laptop and just bring the file to work on a usb key or cd or floppy and just run the file. So all programing is done at home. I have full access to this machine and the program it runs on 4 to 6 floppy discs not sure what order but i will figure it out. I'm think the tooling info are on the last two discs. So i can load it onto my computer at home if i must. One thing i can't do is change the program on the machine, it must be left alone. If i have to type it in manualy, like copy text or cut and paste it can be done. Or if another approach is required please suggest. All i want to do is Learn.

Any Help Would Be Greatly Appreciated,
Regards
Midnight Mayhem

If only the boss knew what mischief i'm getting up to afterhours.

[battwell]

learning biesse is the hard bit! as i found out
read my other posts to see what i came across.
you cant read biesse disks onto a pc... different format. disk wont be recognised.
your limited to approx 11k programs which is way too small for nice signwriting. although you can split the files and run in sequence which ive done. like i said, look through my other threads. things are possible but at a cost im afraid

[knap]

hi, you could actually use the DXF import function of the control, however you can only use floppy disks for this function (assuming you control is NC400 or NC410 but if it is NC500 then this is pc based)

[battwell]

i dont think the 400 has a dfx import? i know the 410 does not
besides you still have the small program limit size to deal with

[MarkT]

The problem is that this control/machine is primarily designed to process panels. Carving and engraving programs would typicallly be to large to do on this control, unless you get creative with conditional loops or making several programs to create one finished product.

Mark T.

[knap]

Hi Midnight Mayhem, I saw that you are from down under, why don't you contact Biesse Australia, they have competent techs there.
And I'm sure that the NC400 have the dxf import function. anyways give them a ring. if you have problems there u can always pm me

[majstor76]

I have Biesse 23 at work. Not sure what NC, its Unix based... I was also thinking about trying engraveing and found out that Vcarve and ArtCAM PRO produce codes very similar what i see on the machine. They have trial periods so you can use them to produce code and try to transfer to machine and see what happens. "see what happens" is very dangerous expression when it comes to cnc machines . But output files for engraveing are about 1 Mb, so if 11k limit is correct its not possible to easy do engraveing on Rover

[battwell]

vcarve looked great to me when i trialled it. i built a small 3ft by 3ft cnc for small carving work.
does anyone have the serial port working on their biesse? mine doesnt have the card installed. just wondering if you can drip feed into the cni controllers for big programs or if you can just import programs using the serial port?
by the way, programs like vcarve output to 3 or 4 decimal places which when i have run on the old 410 controller runs very jumpy! works fine at 1 or 2 decimal places. Another thing i noted was the amount of backlash in my machine (try routing out a small circle, say 20mm with a 12mm cutter and use a digital caliper to see how much it is out.)