RS232 Drip Feed time out? Maybe

[Rocko1]

I have been using the RS232 Drip Feed on my 98 VF3 for quite awhile now , but today I had something interesting happen where there was alot of roughing code and alot of finish code in the program. It was only 8mb size of file and I have transferred much bigger files in the past. I noticed that it looked like hyper terminal had timed out for some reason and the code was still not dripping to the control. Of course the machine was still digesting the code in its memory but this is the first time that I have had it time out like that. It did it twice. Any suggestions?

[Rocko1]

Also will the machine just stop at whatever position in the code where it abruptly stops?

[gar]

080206-1206 EST USA

Rocko1:

There may be a timeout in HyperTerminal, I do not know. There is none in HAAS.

HAAS uses most of its unused program memory space for a buffer in drip mode. Suppose you have 85% available, then you start drip feeding. This buffer will begin to fill. If you do not start the CNC cutting, then there will be no stop handshake signal until this buffer is full. At that point HAAS tells the sender to stop. Now you push the start button and data will be removed from the buffer for machine execution, when the buffer drops below some level it requests (XON or RTS high) that the sender send more data. This handshake continues until the end of the data. When the sender is done there might be a large amount of data in the HAAS memory. On a 1 meg machine and my 85% space use factor from above this may be about 900,000 bytes. The HAAS may still run for a long time.

What happens if the sender quits before the end of the program? HAAS will run until it runs out of data. What happens at the end will depend upon what were the last characters after the last "end of line". Might cause a crash. For example:
G01 X0.5 Y0. when maybe Y should go to 0.9.

Try CimcoEdit 5. I do not believe it times out.

.

[Rocko1]

Gar , do you know how much it costs? I really only need it for 1 machine. It was strange that this was the first time this happened in all these months of doing 16mg+ size files. Thanks

[gar]

Rocko1:

If you have Mastercam prior to X Cimco Edit is part of the package.

Direct from Cimco I believe Edit 5 is about $450.

If this was only a rare occurance, then maybe there was a different cause. Did you get some sort of message that said timeout?

Note: you can set timeouts in Cimco, but you can also not set them.

.

[Rocko1]

No, there was no error it just shows the communication symbol on hyperterminal bleeping. Thanks for your help.