New (old) Milltronics owner, lots of questions

[Brian L]

ZZZZ,

Thanks for the info, I suspected the VFD was waiting for a signal and that's why it was in the faulted condition.

The tool, first time I tried it, nothing budged, so I took a plastic hammer and tapped on the side of the holder and it sprung free (yes, took the tool out, had rags and wood between it and the table), but it falls maybe 1/2" or so and then the balls are still hanging on the retention stud. I'll try some repeated releases and see if it doesn't eventually pop free.

The CMOS battery, watch style pancake battery I assume? On the motherboard in the card cage? If that battery is toast and I don't have something to replace it with, if I hook the computer up to a 110V extension cord, can I keep the parameters intact until I get a new battery? or make a copy? Will I need DOS too? Or is that going to be gone too?

I remember reading about the procedure for parameters here somewhere, will go looking....

[trevj1]

I own one like yours, and ran one at work for some time.

If your spindle is not retracted above the home position, the tool will not be released. At least the machine at work has a hand drawn line about an eighth of an inch above the Zero line, marked as the tool change position. Can't move the spindle up unless ypu pop the belt off the servo and hand-bong the ballscrew around to move the spindle that little bit higher so the balls will clear the pull stud.

Two batteries to look out for. The CMOS battery on the motherboard and there is another one on the SimDisk board as well, IIRC. I dealt with the latter, on our work machine a while back, and it went reasonably well. Until the SimDisk skipped a groove a blew a trace on the card, in any case.
http://www.cnczone.com/forums/milltr...t_boot_up.html

Milltronics emailed me a copy of a workbook for the conversational programming for the asking. Maybe worth asking them if they can send it to you.

Cheers
Trev

[Brian L]

Hi Trev,

Thanks for the link to that thread... a question though, why does that thread not show up on the page when I open up this forum? Are there multiple pages of threads (older ones?) I'm not seeing anything but one page.... shoot, I'm probably missing all sorts of info.

I found the battery on the motherboard, (with the help of a friend, I didn't know exactly what to look for) but have not pulled the Simdisk card out yet to look for a battery there. A question, I have three identical looking cards, assume that those are XYZ axis cards.... the first one has the little two wire connector that hooks to something (round cylindrical item) labeled "Keyboard" on the MOBO. So is that one the Simdisk card, or is it the next one to the left that is the Simdisk card?

Tool change, I did run the ballscrew manually (the cover on the end of the Z axis motor is the only thing actually missing on the machine) all the way up until it stopped, then carefully grabbed the end of the belt pulley to hold it from turning and attempted the tool release... I suspect the balls in the retention knob gripper are stuck from sitting and it's going to take a bit of playing around to release.... I'll have to wait for help, don't have enough hands to shoot air into the cylinder and fool around with the bottom of the spindle at the same time.

I will contact Milltronics this morning and see what I can get as far as some info and help, I've found a few pdf's floating around with some programming tips, and now the one regarding setting up the SRAM drive.... be nice if they had all of these listed in one spot on the website.

[Brian L]

OK, I figured it out, when I subscribed to this forum, my settings were to only see the last page.... wow... I have 25 pages of threads to catch up with..... shoot, talk to you guys around Christmas time then...

[Marty_Escarcega]

I'm helping Brian with his machine. The old 286/16 would not post so I'm going to upgrade it with a new old stock 486DX2/66 with 4meg memory. I'd like to try and boot it to a CF Card. Has anyone successfully done it? I did it with a much newer Pentium 4 computer. My concern are the hard disk parameters that would need to be set in CMOS. Also I am aware of the partition size with an old Dos machine. I think I can get a hold of Dos 6.22. Then I understand it is a matter of copying the files from the SIMDISK for which I have ordered a new battery. Brian's was dead. Machine had been sitting for quite some time.

Also, has anyone successfully replaced the CRT monitor with an LCD monitor? Looks straight forward to me, 8/16bit ISA VGA card and plug it directly into the new monitor?

Thanks in advance for any advice/comments.
Marty

[Marty_Escarcega]

Made some progress on Brian's computer. The original 286/16 motherboard was all but dead, would not POST. Hung after the EGA bios was displayed. Located a new old stock 486/DX2-66 motherboard with memory and CPU. All 8 expansion slots were 16 bit ISA. I replaced the battery on the SIMDISK it was bad.
I got a 2Gig Transcend 133 Compact Flash card, IDE adapter and a new copy of MS Dos 6.22. Luckily the motherboard recognized the CF drive, I was able to partition the CF drive to one 2Gig partition. Loaded DOS on it, ran FDISK /MBR and the drive was bootable. I powered down the motherboard, removed the CF drive and installed the sim disk, with some finnageling, I was able to copy all 3 directories \RAM \ROM \CNC to a single floppy disk. I removed the SIMDISK, reinstalled the CF drive booted and created the 3 subdirectories and moved the respective files into them. I edited. the PATH.DAT file to change the drive letters to C:. (thanks for the advice and suggestions ZZZZ) so I am at the point I believe ready to hand load the parameter file after being reassured we are good to go.

[Brian L]

Fantastic work Marty, can't thank you enough for helping with the computer end of all of this, I'd be totally lost. Pretty sure I sent you the parameter list that Milltronics supplied to me... is that something we can load now, or have to be back in the machine with the axis drives and such hooked back up?

I see light at the end of the tunnel now.... hot dog...

[Brian L]

Pictures of the computer progress.... I've gotten a lot of cleaning and rebuilding done also, will be moving the console down and out to where I can reach from my wheelchair, so pictures of all that will be forthcoming in the next week or so.

Old Simdisk card:



New MOBO with CF card drive instead of Simdisk:



Booting up through self test:



And last but not least, the machine software:

[Brian L]

And yet more progress thanks to Marty and numerous help from ZZZZ and others on this forum....

Computer re-assembled and running with the CF card:



Control pendant, which we will trim down the box and make it much smaller in thickness:



and a close up of the new LCD display, fits perfect, will make a new bezel to cover the mounting screws:

[Brian L]

Had a lot of progress today, Marty came over and we reinstalled the computer, pulled some new wiring through the machine and powered things up. Unfortunately, the control hangs up at start up and shows error 449, axis drives not powered up. Checked some of the relays in the back, we have a light on CR1A and CR5, but no lights on CR1.

I assume we have something stopping the machine from coming up al the way and powering the axis drives, but can't seem to track it down. Check for enough way lube, had air pressure, although not sure if it's a requirement, made sure we weren't on any limit switches... so kind of looking for a suggestion from those in the know....

Probably something simple, just don't know where to look. One question, when putting in the parameters, we wanted to put in the ball screw compensation figures, but couldn't find where/how to do that.... I thought I had read somewhere on the forum how, but now I can't find it and searches aren't turning up the info.... if somebody could point me in the right direction it would be appreciated.

[Marty_Escarcega]

Had a lot of progress today, Marty came over and we reinstalled the computer, pulled some new wiring through the machine and powered things up. Unfortunately, the control hangs up at start up and shows error 449, axis drives not powered up. Checked some of the relays in the back, we have a light on CR1A and CR5, but no lights on CR1.

I assume we have something stopping the machine from coming up al the way and powering the axis drives, but can't seem to track it down. Check for enough way lube, had air pressure, although not sure if it's a requirement, made sure we weren't on any limit switches... so kind of looking for a suggestion from those in the know....

Probably something simple, just don't know where to look. One question, when putting in the parameters, we wanted to put in the ball screw compensation figures, but couldn't find where/how to do that.... I thought I had read somewhere on the forum how, but now I can't find it and searches aren't turning up the info.... if somebody could point me in the right direction it would be appreciated.

Brian, also post which lines from the Diagnostic screen had 1's. That might be helpful. This 4D has Fenner Servo drives.

[Brian L]

Here are some pictures. THe first is the alarm screen:



This is the Diagnostics X page showing the 1's in three spots, all other values are zero's: