Arrow 1500 realtime board problems

[WrenchX1]

Hello,
I'm curremtly having issues with the realtime board on a 1998 cincinnati milicron arrow 1500. the machine will at random alarm out for "realtime timeout" and the Z axis will make a sudden drop (roughly .125") at what seems to be full rapid. It has been looked over by multiple local CNC tech's and none of them seem to have any answers as to how and who can fix this issue. MAG IAS, LLC was also contacted and tech support told us to set the jumpers on the RTCPU from 100MHz to 80MHz. this fixed the realtime issue but created more alarms, "once per pocket switch failure" and "tool drum1 not parked". So far the problems all point to the RTB, If anyone can tell me where i can have the RTB replaced/refurbished or get me pointed in the right direction it would be greatly appreciated.

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[maver1ck]

I'm not going to say your realtime board can't have failed, but in all the years I've worked on these, I've never had to replace a RT board, so seems unlikely. There is a battery that needs to be replaced eventually, but when the battery fails, it seems to be a working one day dead the next situation, not random errors like you are seeing.

I have seen random Realtime Timeout errors caused by a number of issues, but recently I have seen a number of them caused by bad power supplies (at least they went away after I replaced the power supply with a new one). I should also mention that in each of these cases, the power supply I was replacing was a "cheap" unit the customer had found online, so you don't want to just go with the cheapest power supply you can find.

If you are interested in trying this as an inexpensive fix first, I stock two different power supplies for these machines, the factory unit, and a less expensive one I have been using for about 3 years without a single failure. Send me a PM and I can let you know more about the options if you are interested.

By the way, the drop of .125" you mention is simply the head falling due to gravity in the small time between the servo drive dropping out and the motor brake engaging.

[Bob Rudella]

Remove the heatsink from the processor chip and clean off the dried out heatsink grease. Re-grease and re-install the heatsink. This clears up all kinds of weird problems. I Added a fan as well. There was no fan plug on the board (pre-Pentium era) so I spliced it into a spare hard drive plug (yellow is +12V) Be VERY carefull with the heatsink clip so you don't gouge the board. If you want to buy a new power supply you have to find an old time "AT" type, not the current "ATX" type.

[WrenchX1]

So we got the power supply installed and up and running. had the machine up for about an hour before the realtime alarm came back. so still searching for any possible ideas for a fix for this issue

[greg b]

Maverick is 100% right about the quality of the power supply,if you get a underated supply it won't last long I have had the unfortunate pleasure of repairing the original and fitting others if you are choosing an older At supply that probably will fit but doesn't generally have the goods, unless rated at a much higher wattage than the stock unit.The stock unit is much heavier duty than a standard power supply and just by feeling there weight differance is a good indication of there quality.Atx power supplies can be used but must be rewired accordingly and 350 to 450 watt would be a recommended minimum if trying to compare to the standard unit,but ignoring all this I would look at the connections from the power supply to the workstation board as they become loose and cause all kinds of problems with transfering voltage,at least thats what I have found along with reseating the boards which have been spoken about many times on this forum,it sounds strange it run for 1hour and then freaked out again hopefully its something simple good luck.

[Bob Rudella]

Here are the underclock instruction if anyone else wants them. It still sounds like a dried out heatsink to me.

[WrenchX1]

Thanks for the support and help guys.

Greg B. we ordered an OEM power supply from maverick, we had it installed by maintenence and the went thru all of the connections and they have reseated all of the borards. Sorry if it seems i lack the knowledge to communicate the problems well. I run,setup, and program this machine but am completely clueless as to fixing it. Unfortunately I'm the only one willing to search out help to try and figure it out becuase I've been dealing with it since august and both managment and maintenence are unwilling to do it.

Bob R.
I'll pas on the info about the heatsink to the maintenence team and see what they can come up with and if it'll help.

Thanks again guys

[Joe Miranda]

Wrench - you never completed this thread. Did the power supply fix your problem or not? If not, did you find some other solution or are you still having the issue? Thanks - Joe

[chopsmitty]

I just had this very same realtime error. As Bob R. said, I removed the heatsink and discarded the aluminum spacer (and white dust that used to be thermal paste), reapplied good thermal paste and reinstalled.
I went this way because I've replaced motherboard batteries recently (being very careful to keep power on the board at all times to avoid loosing BIOS). My machine is also converted to SSD and has an ethernet card.
Anyway... it seems to be working again! Which makes sense because it's been quite hot with very little trade winds (Hawaii).
We are adding a small fan right now to further assist cooling. The fan is a Noctua NF-A4X20 PWM and we just wired up a 12v brick to it.

[AymenTajine]

I just had this very same realtime error. As Bob R. said, I removed the heatsink and discarded the aluminum spacer (and white dust that used to be thermal paste), reapplied good thermal paste and reinstalled.
I went this way because I've replaced motherboard batteries recently (being very careful to keep power on the board at all times to avoid loosing BIOS). My machine is also converted to SSD and has an ethernet card.
Anyway... it seems to be working again! Which makes sense because it's been quite hot with very little trade winds (Hawaii).
We are adding a small fan right now to further assist cooling. The fan is a Noctua NF-A4X20 PWM and we just wired up a 12v brick to it.

how did you convert it to SSD please ?

[chopsmitty]

how did you convert it to SSD please ?

Simple IDE to SATA adapter and cloned the drive to a tiny SSD

[AymenTajine]

Thank you for your fast reply, what Software did you use to clean the IDE to SSD please? And also I'm having a problem with the RT BOARD BIOS settings, do you have a backup please of the BIOS settings please? I do have one that used to be working fine, but this time for some reason it's no longer working, the machine is not recognizing the RT boards I have ( multiple ones )