Centurion 6 upgrade to single board computer

My old VM-15 Mill (I purchased it new1998) motherboard battery finally gave up the ghost. I could turn on the machine but the BIOS parameters would reset to default.

I have been wanting to upgrade the processor speed anyway. Some of the longer programs take too long to verify (30 min ). So I purchased the upgrade from Milltronics.

Talking about a great experience, working with them is so easy. Thanks Milltronics.

The new control is so much faster, wow. It also updated me to the latest firmware.





Cheers
Dave

It's great to hear of success stories like this.
What firmware did you have?
Which one does the control have now?

We updated our VM24 to a single board computer a few years ago and it was the best thing we ever did and adding the Ethernet option made it even better. I only wish our new 2012 VM20 with the 8200 controller was as user friendly. The old adage should have applied here: "if it ain't broke don't fix it". We do all our programming away from the machine so we DNC everything... well we did until the 8200 showed up. Now it takes twice as long to load and run programs on that POS controller. What were they thinking?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tlowe

It's great to hear of success stories like this.
What firmware did you have?
Which one does the control have now?

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I had 6.6184 that came from over 10 years ago.
Now I have 6.6407

So far it is perfect. I have verified long programs and they are much faster. I would say 5 times faster. Graphics update is fast now, like when you change the view.

They transferred all my coordinate systems and user parameters and tool offsets . . . everything.

They asked me how I wanted the networking set up and I said to use TCP/IP with a static address. But then they started to explain how I couldn't connect to it with the firewall turned on and that just wasn't acceptable on my network. So I switched it back to netBEUI like I had it before. My setup is with an old Windows 2000 Pro machine that has two network cards in it. One card is netBEUI connecting only to the mill the other card connects to the rest of my network. My CAD/CAM laptop can write g-code directly to the Windows 2000 computer. Then I just walk over to the mill select that same network location on the Windows 2000 computer and press run. Easy peezy lemon squeezy.



Cheers
Dave

Quote:

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Originally Posted by moldcore

We updated our VM24 to a single board computer a few years ago and it was the best thing we ever did and adding the Ethernet option made it even better. I only wish our new 2012 VM20 with the 8200 controller was as user friendly. The old adage should have applied here: "if it ain't broke don't fix it". We do all our programming away from the machine so we DNC everything... well we did until the 8200 showed up. Now it takes twice as long to load and run programs on that POS controller. What were they thinking?

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DNC? Why do you use DNC mode on the VM24 with a Centurion 6 if you have networking? Does it do something the run command cannot do?

I remember using DNC years ago before I had a network card. I used to have a computer set up with an RS-232 link to the milling machine. That would let me dribble in large programs that would not fit on a floppy.

What does the 8200 do better?


Cheers
Dave

On the Centurion 6 I use the network to transfer the program to the machines RAM and then DNC from there. Seems to run better from RAM than off the network. If you have multiple machines like we have, I've found it safer to do it that way. Only thing is that the 8200 control doesn't allow you to do it that way. You have to load into the controller’s parts directory first then search and run it from there. So you have to do a search twice, once when you load and again when you run. That extra step cost time and money especially if there is a large number of files in the parts directory to search through. The 8200 controller parts directory can hold a couple of gigabytes. That may sound like a great option to have until you realize that there is no way of organizing that directory, at least I haven’t been able to figure out how. And don’t get me started about the controllers internal clock.

BTW, our Cent 6 is using 6.6398 from 3 years ago. No problems. Networked to a Windows 7 computer that was a pain to set up. After 3 years I can’t remember if we used TCP/IP or netBEUI, but I do remember we tried both.

So on your centurion 6 if instead you use the RUN > MENU > DRIVE to load the program into the machine, you can have problems with the other machines on your network trying to compete for bandwith? I thought that loaded the program into ram right away and never needs to go back to the network drive as it runs.

The DNC option does not use lookahead correct? My manual says they are not really equal but I do not know the implications of RUN vs. DNC.

On the 8200, I totally agree, some of the simplest things like having to search twice for a program can really upset me too.



Cheers
Dave

I've never had a problem using the DNC option. I've never heard or seen anything about the look ahead using DNC. You may be right but the programs seem to run just fine with no slow downs. The RUN > MENU > DRIVE option may be a little quicker, I'll have to give it a try. The 8200 doesn't have that option, you have to load it into the parts folder first, no other options that I can see. I've been using the DNC option for 15 years because of large files and lack of storage space. Now I just load into RAM.