What software is necessary for RS232 Communication?

[61SedanMan]

I just posted a question about wearing out a usb port and realize that a rs232 cable is in my future. What Software needs to be running on a PC to communicate directly to a Haas? Can you drip feed from a PC or is this for whole file transfers? The reason I ask is I am limited to 1mb memory on my mill. Thanks.

[swain]

I bought a program on ebay, and it has worked out real good.

Controllink systems. Program called machine link. 812-637-6800 is thier phone.

You can drip feed on machines with one meg <which mine has also>
First program I ran had several hundred thousand lines of code.

Only problem i had, was following the direction in haas manual for dnc. they said use 19200 baud. Gave some crazy signals to machine. Called controllink,
and they had me drop it back to 9600...been running since.

Good luck

Swain

[gar]

080406-1554 EST USA

61SedanMan:

Our I232 Isolator system would be useful to you. This provides electrical isolation at both the computer and CNC, and 115.2 kbaud up to 4000 ft. Very useful to avoid noise problems and provide maximum transfer rate of the CNC.

In a pinch you can use HyperTerminal that comes with Windows. If you use Xmodem at 115.2 kbaud Hyperterminal has very poor thruput efficiency. Its thruput is very good in XON/XOFF. Not a convenient program with which to work.

A rather good communication program is Cimco Edit 5, very reliable, and moderately simple to use. It does not have Xmodem capability. High baud rate thruput is very good. We use it for testing our I232 modules.

Cimco DNC Max has Xmodem and it is quite efficient sending to HAAS. Runs at about 90% of theoretical maximum thruput for 115.2 kbaud. Receive from HAAS is somewhat slower, nothing like the slowness of HyperTerminal. Thruput is very good in XON/XOFF mode.

www.cimcosoftware.com for Cimco
and
www.beta-a2.com for my web site.


080406-2206

awain:

I expect your machine will stutter in areas with many small strokes at 9600 baud doing drip feed. That is 12 times slower than 115.2 kbaud.

.

[KevinWilkins]

One CNC makes a program that is freeware file transfer and editing. I forget the name of it but I use it every day and "free" is pretty low price. I think they have a version that costs money if you use it for multile machines but for one machine it's free. Set up was about 10 minutes.

[Rocko1]

I do not think One CNC has that download available anymore.

[MrWild]

Go here. NCCNet-Lite is a single machine non-DNC Freeware com system for RS232 links. It works pretty good.

http://www.cadem.com/

If you want to kill two birds with one stone, Dolphin CAD/CAM has a comm program as part of the package, and they offer very fair Hobbiest pricing. For the cost of a really neat CAD/CAM program, you also get the comm. Can't beat it.