Replacing Floppy Drive on Machine Controls

[ObrienDave]

Greetings,

Anyone know of a way to replace the floppy drive on a machine controller,
such as a fadal hs88 or haas, with a media card reader or USB port?

Is there an adapter that would plug in to the floppy cable?

I would like to use a USB drive or compact flash card to replace the floppy
rather than going with a large DNC network.

TIA!

[Al_The_Man]

First you would have to find out what type of interface, often the Floppy unit has a RS232 port to link up to the CNC, if so it can often be possible to use any RS232 to USB adaptor.
Al.

[gar]

050731-2029 EST USA

ObrienDave:

On HAAS I believe they use a standard floppy parallel connection from the floppy disk controller to the floppy drive. Even if you could convert to a flash memory card you would probably be limited to the same total storage as a floppy and more certainly to an 8.3 filename format. If the floppy controller had much greater capability you could not change this without changing HAAS software.

Fadal I have no idea.

We have a product that might be useful to you. This is our I232 System for RS232 to RS232 with Isolation at both ends, high baud rate, and long distance. The standard form of the I232 works up thru 115.2 kbaud, and up to 4000 ft at 115.2 kbaud. The system provides good ground loop isolation. We have applied a 1000 v rms 60 Hz sinewave to the interconnect cable and produced no data errors or equipment damage. Newer HAAS machines can operate at 115.2 kbaud ( 3-96 limit was 38.4 while 3-98 works at 115.2 ). Machines sometime before 1998 were limited to 38.4 kbaud. Long distance in a normal situation is about 4000 ft. Peak short time isolation is about 2000 v.

One of your posts references 10,000 surfaces, this would imply large files, and possibly bigger than your machine memory. Our I232 should communicate about 500,000 bytes per minute at 115.2 kbaud to HAAS. The I232 is not the limitation, rather Windows and associated communication software introduces some noticable data rate loss compared to the theoretical rate. Also on RECV at HAAS there is processing time as data is received. You readily see this difference by checking the time to send a file to HAAS and then sending exactly that same file from HAAS back to the computer. In DNC at high baud rates you can generally eliminate start-stop on short fast strokes.

The I232 works very well for either loading files to HAAS memory or DNC ( drip feeding ).

See our web site www.beta-a2.com .

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