Hello guys and thank you for your help. I am new in the engineering profession and new in these forums so i would like to apologize in advance for my lack of knowledge of the beautiful field of CNC. Furthermore i will try to be as explanatory as possible to compensate for said disadvantage so i would kindly ask for your patience and tolerance to my ignorance.

I just graduated as a mechanical engineer and started a trainee ship in a machine shop a week ago. Before that i had never seen a CNC machine in my life. I just knew from university what they are and a few G-code commands like G00 , G01 etc.I must say i have learned a lot of new things in a week but not enough to dripfeed yet. Said machine shop has a few Okuma workstations bought in the 90s and they lack memory. They want me to drip feed their OSP700M .

This workstation has 2 ports on the side. one says "RS232" and the other says "DNC". Both are 25 pins. I read that i can not drip feed through the RS port but i havent found exactly why yet.

The PC i will connect to the station has windows XP (i think) , a 9 pin RS port and i downloaded a program called dnc4u which is not free but has a 60 day trial period. I connected the DNC port to the PC and tried to establish connection by using the programm. So far i managed to send a program from the machine to the pc but it comes back as giberish and the program tells me that i need to finetune the parameters in order to establish a good connection.

I tried to give the most basic info quickly. I have more detail but i dont know which of those are relevant. so i proceed with my questions and i will fill in the gaps as we go

1) am i right to start with the DNC port (since this is what will be used eventually for drip feed) or should i establish connection through the RS port first?
2) In the side of the machine appart from the 2 ports there are 2 small levers saying "DNC" above both of them. Also above the first it says "communication" and above the second it says "MEM.REMOT.OPERAZ.CON" i hope this is the "buffer operation" lever it says in the manual . I am getting some errors that say "3218 ALARM C DNC start condition 1. The CNC is not in the normal state when communicating with the protocol A". I dont know how to get the CNC in normal state. Does this has to do with the 2 levers? I dont know in what mode or condition the CNC should be in , in order to connect to pc (manual, auto , something else and what exactly?)
3) should the program i try to upload start with % then $tTESTPROGRAM.MIN% (if the name of the program in the pc is "testprogram") and then at the last line another % or this is not important?
4) I managed to view the communication parameters of the machine by typing CMPS after pressing Aux (edit?). they are 9600 baud rate, 1 stop bit, no parity, among others. I put the same numbers in dnc4u parameters as well as the com port properties from the control panel but nothing is improved. Are the machine communication parameters correct or should i tweak them?
5) since i got giberish can we at least conclude that the com port as well as the cable is correct?
6) do you know the program i am using? Can you propose something simpler and more robust?


Thank you so much for any effort you spent reading this. I am sorry for my absolute lack of knowledge of CNC but they did ask me to dripfeed nevertheless and i want to do my best . I am reading the manuals and cant find exact answers to the questions i am asking above so i would greatly appreciate your help. Feel free to ask me for clarifications if you feel you want to help.