Need Help!- Let me tell you a story about our 210i Controller :)

[AccessTCA Admin]

Good afternoon everyone. My name is Chris F. and currently I am completely stumped by our KOMO/FANUC provided 210i-M controller. It is running a KOMO provided Windows98 installation and has run flawlessly for years until recent. The machine and control is about 8 years old now.

Well, I am an admin tasked with keeping Access TCA's infrastructure up and running daily. I have no real knowledge of CNC operation or controllers But have learned alot during this interesting trip!

Let me recap -

Few weeks ago we were having issues with our controller. No video output on the screen. FANUC has us ship them our screen/controller with the 98 HDD. No problem. A week later we receive back the HDD, screen/controller, and a new PC Card with an invoice stating that the original PC Card was bad (we are on our 3rd one). They said they would assemble and test, which they did not. When I opened the packaging for the PC Card, one of the resistors fell off the board. Soldered back on fine no big deal. Move SRAM from old PCC to new PCC, assemble and voila! Up and running.

Problem though. All machine parameters were lost due to the batteries being unplugged from the controller for so long. Another problem, the previous management which is long gone either has possession or has lost all existing paperwork and software on the machine.


Long story short, we get our paperwork from KOMO and have been going back and forth between KOMO and FANUC about this controller. We have bought and been shipped countless useless floppy disks, parameter charts, and talked to pretty much every tech available at these two companies. Honestly I feel as if I am being jerked around since this machine is so ancient and replacing the entire CNC / controller is not an option at this time.

Working with them I have been able to reprogram (or blank out) the SRAM and change some parameters around to get the openDNC program to function but this is as far as i get.

I have all the parameter files from KOMO but cannot get them to load as the hard keys under the screen, EDIT/MDI/JOG etc do not work! The soft keys on the screen do. I think I can progress to the next steps if someone could possibly outline a procedure to put the control into edit mode. Also, if someone local would like to come out and lend a hand I'm sure we would compensate you for your time.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I thank everyone for their time spent reading this long and hopefully thought out post

~Chris F.

[spark-el]

You may have lost the 24VDC to the Fanuc MDI panel, and you won't be able to go into edit mode without it. If the LED's on the buttons aren't lighting that is probably the case. Suggest making sure the machine is not in hard overtravel, this would probably cut control power to the panel. Also check all fuses. If not, you might have to jumper the 24VDC to the board to get into edit mode.

[One of Many]

It sounds like someone may have missed installing the driver for the MDI Keyboard or it is the wrong version. I thought Komo kept a copy of all parameters of every machine at build time.

Yours being a win98 machine, be aware of NT based(XP or Win2K) drivers that might be incompatible. Many drivers that come with new hardware no longer include 98 drivers nor support it. This might leave you looking for legacy hardware. The load order of the divers may also be essential, where it needs the use of one before it can install the next properly.

I have had to replace a few hard drives and reload them on our Komo's, but have not had to worry about internal parameters so far. Well, other than resetting the absolute encoder, tool change, and presetter reference positions.

I did find one PCI video card for our larger external display that would lock up the PC randomly. Putting it back to the stock condition and removing any optional cards makes it somewhat easier to troubleshoot.

DC

[AccessTCA Admin]

Things are all figured out. KOMO was giving us the wrong parameters and such. Once we got the proper ladder and parameters loaded in the CNC operators took over to finish bringing up the machine.

Thank you for the replies