WIRELESS VS WIRED DNC VS NETWORK

[Doug Funny]

Greetings all,

Shop I work in has a hardwired DNC system. Because of the length of cable from the hub to some machines, they can only handle a 4800 baud rate. Larger programs can take a long time to download. Does distance affect your max baud rate over a wireless system? Have any of you connected your machines to the network? 

 

Thanks,

Doug

[JParis]

Many times to maintain a good wifi connection, a shop will install a bridge or repeater so that there's  a strong signal available near machines that may be away from the router in a large shop...

Over the years I have seen that in a decent wireless setup the only thing restricting the baud rate is the max rate of the machine itself.

[Doug Funny]

49 minutes ago, JParis said:

Many times to maintain a good wifi connection, a shop will install a bridge or repeater so that there's  a strong signal available near machines that may be away from the router in a large shop...

Over the years I have seen that in a decent wireless setup the only thing restricting the baud rate is the max rate of the machine itself.

Thanks for the feedback. Our company is in 2 locations right now and looking to consolidate under one roof. When we do, I need to decide which route to go with this when we move. I can't imagine the cost will be much different between wireless and network 

[JParis]

3 minutes ago, Doug Funny said:

I can't imagine the cost will be much different between wireless and network 

an addition is the wireless boxes at the machines...they're not killer expensive but over wired, they are an additional cost...Moxa has made the ones I have mostly seen and used and they were reliable

[Doug Funny]

38 minutes ago, JParis said:

an addition is the wireless boxes at the machines...they're not killer expensive but over wired, they are an additional cost...Moxa has made the ones I have mostly seen and used and they were reliable

Some of our machines are not Ethernet ready so, I'd need to buy boxes if I went that route 

[JParis]

13 minutes ago, Doug Funny said:

Some of our machines are not Ethernet ready so, I'd need to buy boxes if I went that route 

Wireless can still run through the RS232 port there are adapters that do work well

[Doug Funny]

Place I worked at had ones from Compumill. They were nice because you could setup wireless, ethernet or plug in a usb if you wanted to.

[Leon82]

We had the moxa boxes and I think we got them up to fanuc setting 12 which may be 19k baud.  

Almost all of our moxa boxes blew up. They replaced them with the new rev version and they have been better.

But at that rate I tried to send an 8 meg program and it took an hour before I stopped it. I ended up running dnc and eventually from the card.

[Corey Hampshire]

Interesting that this shows up today. We are talking about setting up some sort of server system here at work also. We have several vintage machines that we have to constantly load and delete programs in. This could save me some work in the future, if we find a viable solution. I would like to know what the best way to do this is. 

[Craig-B]

Back in 2015 when I was in manufacturing, we setup 32 machine with the Moxa devices and Cimco DNC this system seem to work well and was easy to manage. It worked better with the machine being wireless, because when we rearrange the shop we didn't have to run any ethernet to any of the machine that had this setup, they all just came back online. 

[CNCZACK]

Check out shop floor automations. We got their usb pendant for DNC on one of our mills. not a single issue with it. We are waiting on the wireless system from them that has DNC so i cant speak on how well that works yet. 

[Ryan Mermall]

CIMCO DNC Max can certainly handle this and has built in drivers for the Moxa units (wired or wireless). Nothing is reliable as a wired connection IMO but definitely depends on a few factors. The Wireless converter boxes are about double the price of the ethernet to RS-232 converter boxes and the wireless ones are getting a bit hard to find in Moxa brand because of the chip shortage and end of life of a particular part. In either situation, you only have a 3ft - ~ 10ft cable that would be transferring RS-232 code format vs the rest is done via ethernet so typically the baud rates can be upped a bit

[Leon82]

We had a metal 3 phase conduit come loose exposing the wires by about 3 inches.  It made all the transfers fail.

Cranky Hank our resident cranky olde timer went to school for electrical engineering. He put a wrap of tin foil on it and it was restored to proper function 

[Mick]

I managed a DNC system that had 28 CNC machines over a large factory. We had four Moxa Nport servers in opposite corners of the factory plugged into the network. All the NC machines had RS232 -> Cat5 adapters and they worked flawlessly with Cimco DNCMax. Barcode requests for NC files were triggered through the same Moxa servers.

The only issue we had with the Moxa servers, was their weak power supplies. We ensured we had external surge protection, as we had a power cut over one weekend and jolt on power up killed the power supplies in three of the four servers.