Sabre 1250 boot problems

I bought a used Sabre 1250 at an auction 3 years ago. It sat in my garage for 3 years because when I got it home the x axis was froze. Back then, it booted fine and the Y and Z axis' moved fine. Recently, I finally got around to digging in to this thing. I pulled the motor and it was seized due to rust from coolant getting into it. I sent it in for repair. I got it back, installed it, and tried booting the machine. The first thing I noticed on the diagnostics was Conv. Servo failed. Then PAGE FAULT 4000f came up. The machine will then not come up due to page fault. I notice DV5 board has a fault light showing red. Also I notice there are red undervoltage lights illuminated on all three axis drives. No faults on spindle drive. I reseated DV5 card, rebooted, same page fault. I disconned all cables from DV5 card, rebooted, same page fault. I pulled the card, rebooted, same page fault. Anyone have any recommendations on where to start diagnosing problems? Another thread had the exact page fault problem and it turned out to be a bad battery on the real time board.

I think you will find the under voltage problem with the drives is because its all to do with the batteries being dead on your realtime and workstation board.The process starts here and I think you will find you may need to get new batteries installed and get the boards reconfigured.Theres a couple of guys on this forum that should be able to help you with that,best of luck.

I figured as much. Hopefully someone can get me instructions on how to change the batteries. Thanks.

Replacing the WS (workstation) battery and setting up the BIOS is pretty easy, you should be able to handle it yourself as long as you have a PS/2 keyboard.

Let me know what BIOS version you have on your WS board and I will see if I have the settings for you. Although, if you are able to get into the A2100 far enouth that you are seeing the diagnostic screen, I question whether this battery is the problem. Although depending on the vintage of your machine, it likely should be replaced anyway to avoid having a problem once you get the machine running.

The RT (Realtime) board is a different story. Some of these batteries are permanent (soldered to the board), so more difficult to change, and since there is no direct video output and in most cases only a legacy keyboard plug, setting up the bios requires finding/buying some legacy computer components. I may be able to set this up for you if you send the board to me (just did this for another shop opn here last month), but I would want to know which board you have so I can verify I have everything necessary prior to commiting to this.

Thanks for your help. I have a Sabre 1250 with serial number 7037AOA-96-0360. I'm an old school computer geek with a good bit experience. I have a closet full of legacy stuff so I think I can do the reflash of the realtime board. I think if I had a little guidance I could handle it pretty easily.

I can get into my CMOS settings upon boot-up of the control and copy all the settings down before changing the WS battery. I think that is easy. Is the WS battery accessible without removing the motherboard?

How about the RT board and battery? What do I need to disassemble to get the board out?

CR2032 was the most common battery on these boards, but they did use some smaller ones for a period of time, so depending on your specific boards, this may not be correct.

The problem with your thinking of getting into the CMOS to write down the settings is if they have already been lost because the battery was too low, the values you will be recording are not correct. If you let me know the BIOS version (what is displayed on the initial screen at startup), I probably can find the correct settings for you.

That said, from my experience, most machines with a dead WS battery do not exhibit the problem you described, and if the RT battery is dead, you are more likely to get "Missing" than "Failed" during the diagnostics. That doesn't mean you shouldn't change them on a machine that is 16 years old, it just may not correct what you are seeing.

In both cases, you will have to remove the motherboards to change the batteries. When you open the electrical cabinet, the silver box is the A2100 control. The WS board is on the far left, next to the power supply with the hard drive mounted on it. The RT board is on the far right.

If you want a more detailed procedure on removing the boards, send me a pm and I'll get back to you. I'm reluctant to post a detailed procedure here because I've seen too many components damaged (i.e. capacitors ripped off motherboards, cables broken, etc.) because people didn't take proper care when removing them.

I was able to get the Real Time board out fairly easily. I checked the battery voltage and it was nearly completely dead. I replaced the battery and powered the board up and I now have the BIOS version: American Megatrends BIOS version 1.00.05.BR0 Now all I really need are instructions on how to get this board setup. I assume that I need to flash the BIOS ? I am hoping that most, if not all of my problems are caused by the bad battery. I went ahead and changed the battery on the WS board too. It was low on voltage also (2.65v).

The RT Bios files are on their way to you. Hopefully this takes care of everything you need to get your machine running.

I will let you know how things go. Thanks so much for all your help!

So I got the batteries replaced and RT board flashed and I powered the machine up. The control booted up with no errors. I was very happy! I pushed the green button to power on the servos and I get an ALARM 39-6. serverity 10 machine power off. This is the same issue I was having before I let the machine sit a couple years. I guess I need some direction on what to do now.

The alarm reads:

The axis drive ready signal [CR_AXES_RDY] and/or servo ready signal [S_SERVO_RDY] have not been received within the allowed time limit.

Thank you in advance.

At least you are back where you started.

Just out of curiousity, have you looked back in the error log to see what type of errors the previous owner was getting? There could be a long history of this alarm. It's not critical to know, but if it is a new alarm, could be as simple as a connector came loose during shipping.

If you got prints with the machine, you should be able to follow the signal pretty easily. +24V signal goes out to the spindle drive, then each of the axis drives and back to an input on the CNC. If the signal is broken anywhere in the chain, the control will see that the servo's are not ready. This alarm is indicating this signal is getting lost somewhere in that chain, you just need to figure out where.

I have not looked at the error log. I've never operated a Acramatic control so I'm not 100% sure where to get at it.
To shine a little more light on the problem, when the green button is pushed, I get a red light fault on the spindle drive after about 10 seconds. The light goes out and the alarm comes up. That doesn't sound good. Any ideas what I my next step should be?

The control has a timer which starts when you press the green power on button. Depending on which software version you have, this timer is slightly different, and in the later versions I believe it could be set with the rest of the parameters.

If the control doesn't see the drive ready signals within this timer, the control will automatically cut power to the drives. They way you have described the problem, this is what it sounds like is happening. The control is faulting first, which removes the DC bus from the spindle drive which causes the spindle drive to fault (undervolt) because it doesn't have any voltage.

You need to watch the drives as you power up the machine to see if one of them is faulting first, or if one never gets to the ready state. If you are a one man shop, a video camera on a tripod is better than an assistant (at least you can trust the sequence of events it gives you).

If the spindle drive fault comes on immediately and 10 seconds later the control faults, then you need to look at the spindle drive, but that is not what you have described.

I didn't have a null modem cable nor a laptop with serial ports. My buddy is coming over tomorrow and we'll check it out then. Thanks for your help.

It looks like I may have misread your post about the sequence of events at startup. If your spindle drive is faulting immediately when you press the power-on button, your next step is to read the error history out of the spindle drive.

Based on your experience with computers, you should be able to make a null modem cable pretty easily. And you don't need a laptop, one of your desktops will accomplish the same thing as long as you are willing to move it near the machine. Desktops are also more likely to still have a serial port so you won't need to mess around with a USB-serial adapter.

The copy of motionlink I have only works on 32-bit systems, that is why I mentioned needing a 32-bit computer. It is possible there is a later version of motionlink that is compatible with 64-bit systems, but I haven't researched it because what I have works well.

So I retrieved the spindle drive fault history. The error that I keep getting is an ERR 14 POWER BUS. I'm not sure what to do now. I'm told I need check the dc bus but I'm not 100% sure what the voltage should be or where to check it. I'm also told I need to check to see if spindle drive parameters have been lost but I also don't know what that means.

Hi folks, I have de same problem with a Sabre 1000 (Conv. Servo failed, and system failed 4000f). My problem begin with a power supply problem. I'd changed it and after that I had a RT Board failure led on bridge board at boot and CNC.EXE error. after a lot of reading, I found that I lost my bios setting on the RT board then I change both battery (WS and RT). I have hardware to go in RT bios. at the beginning I had some problem but almost are solve, exept the Conv. Servo error. I realy suppose that is a Bios setting that is wrong, but wich one??? Because everything ran well before

My Bios is Award Modular Bios v4.51PG

Maybe somebody can help me on That???

Thank you
Phil

Hi dear.
I have a Cincinnati Milling Machine. With Acramatic 2100 control. I had a bios battery message. And the clock was constantly erased. I changed the battery on the ws board. Unfortunately, I have ws fail alarms. And does not work.
This ws board model is: aa 670917-310
Do you have bios settings?
please guide me .
my email : [email protected]
Thanks