centurion 5 to 6 upgrade?

[fcycles]

I'm considering upgrading my cen 5 to 6. Milltronics quoted a price of $2100
They want the card cage sent in and they replace everything.
He said it would be a "single card" and replaces the acroloops,
64mb memory (seems pretty little for todays tech and an upgrade)
Hard drive instead of the simmdisks. I'm not sure what axis cards replace the acroloop cards.

Has anyone had any experiences doing this? Was it worth it, performance etc..? Is Centurion 6 similar to run compared to 5?

I tried to find a similar thread here but couldn't, I seem to recall seeing one a while back?

Thanks!!

[Brian L]

I don't know what all the Milltronics upgrade entails.... but I just (with a lot of help from a friend) rebuilt my Centurion 5 control. We put in a new mother board, with 4mb of memory, upgraded to a 12" LCD display rather than the CRT, removed the Simdisk card and am using a 2gb Compact flash card to act as a hard drive.

Of course this still uses the three axis cards and such, nothing seemed to be wrong with any of that, so I'm back up and running with a minimum of expense. I still haven't figured out all that the Centurion V will do for me, so I can't help you on differences between the V and VI

[ZZZZ]

Did the $2100 quote cover the 5 to 6 upgrade, or the Single Board Computer upgrade?

That is about what I paid for the SBC upgrade, but it didn't include the NCB board and interface panel necessary to make it into a Cent6. I still used the Acroloops.

[fcycles]

they said it was the whole thing updating it to a cen 6. I asked if it replaced the acroloops and they said yes. How long ago did you upgrade yours? Maybe they're using different components now?

[fcycles]

Originally Posted by Brian L I don't know what all the Milltronics upgrade entails.... but I just (with a lot of help from a friend) rebuilt my Centurion 5 control. We put in a new mother board, with 4mb of memory, upgraded to a 12" LCD display rather than the CRT, removed the Simdisk card and am using a 2gb Compact flash card to act as a hard drive. Of course this still uses the three axis cards and such, nothing seemed to be wrong with any of that, so I'm back up and running with a minimum of expense. I still haven't figured out all that the Centurion V will do for me, so I can't help you on differences between the V and VI

That's great, i've had several failures recently, and just getting tired of the down time. I may need a new motherboard if my current fix doesn't work. Where did you find yours? I assumed they would be discontinued like everything else in this card cage. The 2gb card would be nice too! If i had that i wouldn't have to drip feed everything. If you don't mind i'd like to know where you sourced the parts and how you did it etc...
Thanks!

[Brian L]

Most all of the parts were found on ebay.... needed new batteries to bring the old Simdisk card back to life to get the software off of it, got those from Allied Electronics. I'll send you a pm with my email address and get Marty involved, he's the electronics guru.

We loaded a fresh copy of DOS 6.22, but realize that you have size limits with DOS (I think that it's the 2gb, why we went with that for the CF card), so I don't know if the 6 upgrade is using a different OS and can run even larger programs.

If you have large programs you drip feed now, send me one and I'll load it in the machine, see if it loads correctly and will run resident from memory.... that way you don't do all of the changes and still find out it won't do what you want.....

[fcycles]

It sounds a bit beyond my skills, i was wondering how you got the cen 5 software off of the simmdisks but it would probably be greek to me. Were you able to find a new motherboard that didn't need a bunch of mods. I can probably handle swapping that out since i believe all of the dos and software is on that seperate simmdisk board.

Hopefully i wont need to, i'm waiting for another i/o card for my rs232. I think that's what crapped out on me but if not it may be the motherboard. Just in case i thought i should look into the Milltronics upgrade if the problem persists. I appreciate your input. I think if i were to try anything more than a simple card swap i'd end up loosing more in down time than i'd save.

I did find on another forum where guys were replacing the floppy with a flash drive that can use an sd card or flash drive, that may be my other option to avoid drip feeding. Gotta fix this i/o problem first though since the floppy runs off of it too.

[Brian L]

Marty would have to answer that, but I do know he was able to copy all the software, parameters and such onto 1 floppy, this was while the Simdisk card was in the computer, then he removed the simdisk card, installed the CF drive card, and copied the files back off the floppy to the CF drive, which is now my hard drive.

I know there were path changes required in the boot up of DOS, how all that works and what you have to do is beyond my skill level. The motherboard Marty found was a pretty direct replacement, had all the appropriate ISA slots to accept the acroloop cards.

I have moved my RS232 to com2 and hooked com1 to a DB9 to RJ45 adapter plug and fished an ethernet cord up to the console, put a jack on the side of the console so I can hook my computer to that, more convenience for me than anything else. I haven't finished the last adapter to the computer yet, but should get that done over the weekend.

[sportybob]

Looking thru this thread, The $2100 is for a SBC update not a C5 to C6 control update. A new C6 control box would be about $7000.
You could also option for a C7 update for about $10K (interface panel, cables, front panel with LCD etc.)


That being said, the SBC update does have the latest software and would be functionaly the same for C5, C6 or C7. The difference being C5 uses Acroloop cards, The C6 used a single 5 axis (NCB) card and the C7 uses a newer PC/104 type NCB card.

64MB of RAM and 64MB of program and parts storage is a lot for most all but the largest of CAM files. if needed, Milltronics also offers a networking and a 256MB storage options. IMHO the networking is more useful and a better value.

If using the conversatioal programming a 2KB file is HUGE!
down load the off line simulator and see all the new conversational functions
http://www.milltronics.net/CNCControl

sportybob