Need Help!- Program to talk to multiple machines

[Waykat1]

I have 2 Haas mills, a Haas lathe and 2 routers, one CMS & one Motion Master. I need all pulling programs from a common server. I have one programmer running Mastercam X4 and the only way my operators have currently to transfer the program code is to use 3.5" floppy's and thumb drives. There has to be a way to get all on a network.

[Machineit]

Originally Posted by Waykat1 I have 2 Haas mills, a Haas lathe and 2 routers, one CMS & one Motion Master. I need all pulling programs from a common server. I have one programmer running Mastercam X4 and the only way my operators have currently to transfer the program code is to use 3.5" floppy's and thumb drives. There has to be a way to get all on a network.

You can hook all of them up to the computer for RS-232 use and just put in a selector switch to route to the right machine. That's the way we did it.

Mike

[Wizzard of H]

The ultimate way to do this WOULD be a network like you use for your computers.

But... if you have a mix of machines and a wide range of ages, that is much harder and expensive than it sounds.

The age-old standby has been RS-232 for a LONG time as Machineit says. But rather than using a switch, there is software and simple hardware that supports a lot more. These may be slower than a network but top speeds can be 115200 bits per second and that will load a megabyte program in 90 seconds.

There are multiple companies making boxes that either connect directly to your PC and provide multiple RS-232 ports or a box that is remote to your PC via USB, or wired network, or wireless network to provide the same. All of these companies also provide software to support communications via RS-232. Companies doing this are Spectrum, Predator, ProDNC, and DNC4U.

My favorite method of using these was a scheme that could be done entirely at the CNC machine. From a Haas machine that has Send and Recv buttons you can do this very quickly. To get a program to the CNC, make a one-line program with one comment in it that is the name of the file you want. Select it and press Send. The PC will find that file, wait about 10 seconds, and then send it to you. After pressing Send, press Recv and the program starts to show up. To store a file at the PC, just make sure the first comment in the program is the name of file you want to store that program as.

[underthetire]

Multiple companies offer such a device. Seen them wireless, wired, and all in between. Spectrum technologies (multi dnc) offers this, refresh your memory has it, and a few others I've seen.