[planebuilder]

This may not be the best place for this but I couldn't find a better spot!
Does anyone know of a program similar to Mach that could be used to control an oven? I love Mach and would like to be able to control our powder coating and acrylic molding ovens with a PC interface similar to the way Mach controls our router. We now have PID controllers and they work very accurately, probably overkill, but the user input and adjustment is a pain due to TINY buttons and readout and the multifunctionality of the buttons. A Mach type screen with "X" axis controlling temp, "Y" controlling time, for instance, and a digital & graphical display from thermocouples would be great.
I have never seen one but can envision some type of Gcode to program a heat cycle.

[smutboy420]

HotAsstools .com makes exactly what your talking about.
As a plug in ready to go system to controll a kiln or electric oven. you can store tempature profiles on your pc and up load them in to the controller. Much eaiser then using ladder menu programing with the tiny buttons every time you need to change to a difrent set of programs for difrent jobs. It even has a temp loger in it to record a oven cycle and will save the temp readings on a timelined graph.

also it runs the programs internaly and the pc only changes programs and settings so if the computer freeses or shuts down or even be come un pluger a program saved in the controller thats runing will go uninterupted.
When its not connected to the pc it works like a reg kiln/oven controller.

[planebuilder]

Thank You for the lead.

[unterhaus]

the most common way that this is done is with National Instruments Labview. I don't know how much a consultant would charge you to write a program like that, it certainly wouldn't be as cheap as Mach. Of course you could buy Labview and program it yourself, but that isn't cheap

[smutboy420]

Even with lab view you need hardware to interface with the oven.
like thermocouple to read the temps in to the computer and a power relay to turn the oven on and off.

Seems like ready made system would be esier sence it just plugs in to the wall outlett and the kiln or oven plugs in to the back of the controller. Then all that is needed is to hook up the serial cable and run the software.
The hotasstools one is percise and can hold with in a fraction of a degree. and the software is pretty stable. It can run a program 64 segments long. So its great for metal casters and ceramic kilns to. as well as powder coat ovens and glass blowing kilns.

[mackeym]

Yep, the labview way would be a pain and expensive. the hardware that would work very well in conjunction with labview would be a multipurpose DAQ card. If you get a temperature controller with a serial interface, then you could avoid the DAQ card ad directly interface labview with the temperature controller.

[High Seas]

smutboy420
thanks for that link - I have been struggling to design/lay out/make such a controller for -SheWhoMeltsGlass- and a 500 dollar solution to PC based is not terribly unreasonable - it comes plug and play.
Cheers - Jim
And it can do double duty in the shop.

[smutboy420]

Yup takes about a whole minute to hook on up and install the software on the pc. all thats needed is a serial port on the pc. Most pcs can also use a usb to serial converter to make it work threw usb. But the usb option is som times tricky to get going on some laptops if it don't have a port a powered port.

You could have a set of files for the controller to controll what ever temps and functions you wanted and the lil mis can have hers. Then yous just have to fight over who going to use the kiln when.

[planebuilder]

Still looking! I found this

Zallus Designs | Zallus Learning Controller Kit
I downloaded the free app to run it, and it's amazing! But the store says "out of stock" , I'm worried it's no longer produced, hope they make more.

[Jim Dawson]

Maybe this would be helpful. https://www.mccdaq.com/index