WHAT DOES THE BATTERY ON THE EUROSTEP CONTROLLER DO?

-=PAB=- · Sun 26 Oct , 2008 13:45 pm

WHY IS IT NEEDED AND WILL THE MACHINE FUNCTION WITHOUT IT?

WHERE CAN I GET A REPLACEMENT AS MINE HAS LEEKED?

Martin · Sun 26 Oct , 2008 18:22 pm

As far as I know the battery is not required on the Eurostep card.

I often service the machines with these cards in but have never needed to replace the battery.

Thu 30 Oct , 2008 11:18 am

I think Martins right - anything we used on those cards was on EPROM.

If its leaking though, you'll want to remove it before it eats into the tracks - the question is, will it work with it open circuit ? Maybe, you'll just have to suck it and see.

Lone_Ranger · Fri 31 Oct , 2008 9:34 am

My 2 cents worth!!

All the CNC machines I have owned/own that have a battery on a board it is usually needed to hold the NC Parameters on the machine, the Denford machines I have owned/own do have EPROMs with the Denford software on and aren`t affected whether the battery is there or not as the information is "burnt" onto the EPROMs.

However, the machines NC Parameters are usually able to be changed (All mine are!!) and if the battery is removed the Parameters are lost!!

I recently installed 128K of memory on one of my Denford Lathes and I had to save all the machine Parameters out as the battery had to be disconnected to install the new memory and the Parameters re-loaded again.

So, it is possible the battery is there for a good reason!!

Just my 2 cents worth!!

Regards
Rob

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Steve · Fri 31 Oct , 2008 10:34 am

I don't know the answer either but all newer versions of the board do not have a battery.

The board is used for other applications and not just the Denford control. The battery could have been fitted to support features that were not used.

Mr Magoo · Fri 07 Nov , 2008 21:43 pm

The MAJORITY of firmware versions used by Denford on the Eurostep board makes no use of the battery and it can safely be removed.

The ones to watch are a few versions of Triac / Novamills with ATC. I think some of these machines that ran v2 VRMilling may save the current ATC position in NVRAM on the card, so no battery would make the ATC forget where the carousel is when powered down.

Mon 10 Nov , 2008 9:34 am

Thats what I was thinking Magoo, but seemed to think that the non volotile ram (NVRAM commands) was actually writing to a Flash device - or is that just the later versions of board (which now don't have batteries) ?

Mr Magoo · Mon 10 Nov , 2008 11:04 am

Yeh. NVRAM was battery backed on Eurostep. I guess the later (batteryless) boards are flash.

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