Denford Software & Machines

Hi all, I am having an occasional problem with my Triac.It stops about half way through an automatic cycle sometimes.Tonight I was drilling 2m/m holes in a fibre glass plate for a Vacuum table (1000 holes),The machine stopped about half way through with the Z axis down at the end of it's drilling cycle.The spindle kept running and no fault messages are on the screen.It was drilling in the middle of a section already drilled so there was not a problem with axis limits.I had to stop the auto cycle and go into jog to stop the spindle and withdraw the Z axis.The machine is a 92 Triac PC running VR milling Version 5.2 with the Baldor USB card and a Pentium 2 600Mhz PC running XP pro. Really annoying because it took an hour to get to this part of the cycle then quit. It has done the same thing before on a simpler job but on restarting the cycle (auto)it goes to the home position and stops there. upon pressing cycle start again it moves to the first XY position and stops.It's as if it has switched to single block mode I could not get it to restart without shutting everything down and rebooting. Any help would be appreciated.

Many thanks

Try updating to ver 5.21
& running easy upgrader.

when the program stopped did you try pressing the play button again? If the problem is as you described in the earlier case and the program moves on a block at a time this is a bug that was fixed in the Comms I/O

As Martin says try the easy upgrader. There have been improvements in the handshaking on the I/O.

Also were you running any vacuum extraction? Static could cause the communications to crash as it zaps the coms on the PC.

Just a tip

In the current version of VR milling you are able to to start a program at any line. If you look on the bottom left menu bar you will find the option

You could guess the line number before the program halted and continue from there

Thanks for the help. Can you point me in the direction of version 5.21 as the latest version I can find is 5.20 which is the one I am using.I am not at present using vacuum but will be by the weekend hopefully.I can simulate my problem by opening the front guard briefly whilst the machine is running in auto,I thought at first that it may be a dicky switch so I strapped out the connections on the terminal block but it did it again.

biggles wrote:Thanks for the help. Can you point me in the direction of version 5.21 as the latest version I can find is 5.20 which is the one I am using.I am not at present using vacuum but will be by the weekend hopefully.I can simulate my problem by opening the front guard briefly whilst the machine is running in auto,I thought at first that it may be a dicky switch so I strapped out the connections on the terminal block but it did it again.

When you did your little test of opening the front guard did you get the correct fault/error message on the screen or nothing at all as per the not simulated stoppages??

Regards
Rob

If I open and close the guard quickly no fault message appears.But if it is open for a short time the fault message "machine not safe" appears.

Hi,

I think we are still currently using 5.20 must be a typo from Martin

Have you run the easy upgrader software on the 5.2 CD and checked the machine is up to date?

Still sounds like the I/O firmware problem