New Haas Weirdness

[TravisR100]

I don't really have a question here but just wanted to share some of the weirdness I've experienced with my new Haas. I just bought a SMM2. It has firmware version 16.06B. This is apparently the latest control firmware. Haas has not yet posted the version notes on their web site for it yet.

So here goes. Probing. I posted in another thread about a problem with tool probing. The problem was that when probing a tool with a tool type of "center drill" I had an odd problem. I put center drill in quotes because on the very same screen it's called a center drill in one spot yet it's called a spot drill in another. No big deal, but inconsistent. Anyhow, on the probing routine for this type of cutter there is no slowdown as it approaches the table probe nor does it rotate the cutter. The first 3 times I probed this type of tool it would have simply snapped off the probe arm had I let it. Of course when a Haas tech came out it worked perfectly and it's worked perfectly ever since. This was when probing from the tool offsets page, not an IPS page. I was also told that probing from the tool offsets page is a new feature. None of the Haas techs who came out had ever seen it before.

Another oddity. On the IPS tool setup screens when using a cutter with an included angle such as a center drill or drill, there is a field called "point" or "included angle." When the cursor is in this field the help text reads "enter 0 or 180 to cancel." It expects a number from 1 to 179 as the angle of the tip of the cutter. On my machine it doesn't matter what you put in. Whatever is entered results in the control stating "invalid number" when you press enter. This functionality is the same as on previous versions but for some reason it doesn't work on mine. The Haas guy that teaches the local Haas classes came out to look at it. He's completely at a loss as for why it won't take a valid number. Tried it with decimals and without.

On the tool offset table on my version there is a column called H for tool length and D for tool diameter. These are the columns used for H and D compensation when using G43/44 and G41/42. So, if I do a probing routine of the tool in the tool offset table it records the probed length and diameter to the D and H columns in the tool offset table. Now, I go to the IPS system and go to the tool setup screen there before running an IPS cutting op. The tool will show the diameter on the IPS tool setup screen from the D column of the tool offset table. Everything looks good. There is no other diameter field that you could enter a value in here. Go to do an IPS op such as facing with that tool and press cycle start and I have a problem. The machine reports "tool diameter cannot be zero." Go back to the tool setup screen in IPs for that tool and it indeed has the diameter (D column) value from the tool offset table. I finally figured out that to make it work you have to copy the D column from the tool offset table to the "actual diameter" column of the tool offset table. I showed this to the Haas tech as well. Again he's confused. He says that the "actual diameter" column is only for calculations in speeds/feeds and shouldn't cause the problem I'm seeing in the IPS ops.

Here's another one that seems to have fixed itself. On the keypad there are buttons for x+, x-, y+, y-, z+, z-, etc. In hand jog mode if I press either x button then rotate the MPG the table moves in the x direction accordingly. Subsequently pressing the z button makes the MPG jog the z axis. Now I press the y+ button and turn the MPG. It will continue to jog the z axis. Pressing y- will switch to the y axis but not the y+ button. At first I thought, dead button. But the button beeps when pressed and you can see the feed rate change when you hold it down. It simply doesn't move the axis or cause a change to the axis that the MPG is controlling. So the Haas tech came out today to take a look. Indeed it behaved exactly as I described above. Then the second Haas tech showed up. The first Haas tech goes to show him the problem and voila, it works as it should. This button has been acting this way for at least 4 days. Luckily the first Haas tech saw the strange behavior and didn't think I was crazy after the self-fixing probing routine. We thought some sequence of buttons after power up may have fixed it so we powered it down then back up. Nope, worked like it should.

So, my y+ button problem corrected itself while the tech was here to at least see the problem. The probing problem corrected itself but unfortunately chose to do so before the Haas tech could see it.
I'm almost tempted to take screen pictures to make some of what I'm trying to explain a little clearer. While a couple of these problems have fixed themselves it doesn't instill much confidence in the machine to do what it's told or at least act up consistently.

I post these so that if anyone else finds version 16.06B on their machine and has a similar problem they know they are not alone!