Denford Software & Machines

Hi,
I have a Micromill 2000 which I bought second hand and have been using with VR5 which I purchased from you. I have been using this with a laptop (Vista) and serial to USB connverter which has been largely successful but has been dropping out with longer programs. I have tried to overcome this issue with a true PCI serial board in an old XP machine without success. Going back to the laptop I cannot now get a connection. The software goes through an attempt to download the Mint file from the machine but fails. Looking at the boards the red segment display just shows a constant upside down 7 and a flashing dot.





Any help to get the mill up and running would be gratefully received.

Rod

I have a similar looking board from a Triac and over time the NiCd battery can leak and is near the RS232 connection so if it has it could be effecting the signals. Replacing the battery and cleaning any residues with distilled or deionised water may help, I'm not even sure if it's required as I have seen mention on the board that in some applications the battery back-up isn't used but I don't know if it's required.

Another issue that could effect RS232 comms with a USB converter which I have seen with FTDI chips is that the driver buffers the comms for a while for efficient use of the USB bus but this can lead to timeouts in some cases such as the equipment I was using. The solution is to go into the device manager and select the USB converter configuration and set the latency to the minimum, 1ms IIRC in XP which I have been told is the minimum due to the USB specs.

Have a look in Device Manager & check out the Com Port settings.

They seem to work better if you set the Com Port to be below 6 if possible.