Gerber Routers

[Todd Zuercher]

Anyone here have experience using Enroute with a Gerber router (Sabre or D-200)?

I'd like to know if it is possible to send a short job description to the router when spooling a job with Enroute, like the job description that is sent when using Gerbers Artpath software?

[MCPservice]

There should not be any problem with you having a description of your file, once you save your output file, that is the name that should show up in your control pad.

[Todd Zuercher]

The couple of test jobs that I have sent to to one of our Sabres using Enroute, have only shown "Load Material" on the screen, then after pressing start, shown the first tool used.

[MCPservice]

When you post what is the file extention.

.cnc
.plt
.anc

The program you are using to communicate may have to be told, to read the character string or Gerber may not be able to display the title string.

[Todd Zuercher]

The files that Enroute outputs for the Gerber routers has the .cnc extention. The spooling program is the OCC (Output Control Center) that came with Enroute, and I believe it uses a subprogram called gcomocc.exe as well as a couple of drivers to actually send the code to the router. Oh, and I am using Enroute Ver. 4.2

[MCPservice]

Then most likely it is your controller that is not reading the characters of the output file name...The company I work for is a Scanvec Distributor, I will bounce this question off of their tech support.

[MCPservice]

The answer from Scanvec and they are going to verify with a actual Gerber customer here is their answer:

It will just indicate that a job is ready to run. The CNC output is just a generic Gcode file that is then converted to Gerber language by GCommOcc.exe, which communicates back and forth with the Gerber controller as the job is spooled to the router. Once completed, the jobs remain in a queue and can be resent.

Hope this answers your question.

[Todd Zuercher]

The Gerber Artpath software uses a seperate file with extention .PRM that has information about the file to be routed (.RTP file in Artpath, .GSP after it is spooled to the spooler program). The file seems to be kind of analigous to the .job file used by the OCC. This .PRM file is where the job info that is displayed at the start of a job is saved. It is on a line that looks like this

szJobMessage=displayed text is typed here

It is looking like adjustments would have to be made to the OCC, GCOMOCC, and or they're driver programs, in order to take advantage of this very valuble (to us) feature of these Gerber routers.

It is a real problem for us because we spool up 10-20 jobs on these routers, spanning multiple work shifts, and the machine opperators have to have some way of knowing what the job is that they are starting at the router, since the spooling computer is remote to the router.

So unless we can get Enroute to do this, we are going to continue to be stuck with Artpath.