drip feeding with a fanuc18m contol

[keith mc.]

i finally got our new mill up and running with some major headaches but thats life. i got one problem, i can send and recieve a program and run it as long as it is small enough to fit into the memory of the machine so how do i run a drip feed program? with my fanuc18im control there is a button i push"drip feed" i dont see it on the fanuc 18m control. Do i need to change the i/o address? please help.

thanks

[Tom Dorgan from American Precision]

Each manufacturer configures the Fanuc buttons to their design. None of our 18i have a drip feed button but if you change the I/O parameter it will DNC. Don't have my manuals at home. Do you have RS232 or ethernet?

[keith mc.]

rs232 cable. currently the i/o channel is set to 0.

[crazy^millman]

Can it use a Memory card if so just use M198 to call programs off the card? You will have to change the comm channel I think it should be 4 on your machine and the card should pop up on the screen when you go to program. Does the machine have a hard drive and can you possible pull it off the hard drive using the data server??

[keith mc.]

hard drive is not large enough and im not sure about using a card, ive never been a big fan of it.

[Tom Dorgan from American Precision]

card works great for us. I bought several Sandisk pcmia adapters that use cheap compact flash cards. Bought a tub of the 32 meg CF Type II on ebay dirt cheap. I run ethernet to all 3 of my machines but at times it goes down I can always pull out some memory cards. The I/O setting for Ethernet is 9. Never used RS232 on Fanuc18i before.

[Tom Dorgan from American Precision]

Searching online says i/o parameter should be 0. Not sure if that is correct. Interesting info here

http://www.machinetoolhelp.com/Application...unications.html

[keith mc.]

thanks guys when i get back to work tommorow i will check all the parameter settings, if all else fails i can always phone fanuc.

[Todd Tracey from Fastech]

Back in the day when I was still running machines on a daily basis, FANUC told me our 0-MA controls could not drip feed (DNC). Fortunately for me I ran in to Craig DeGarmo from Multi-DNC (now Spectrum). FANUC had told me they could fix me up with a mag tape system for 60 to 70k per machine. Wasn't going to happen. Craig advised me based on serial number what parameter to change to enable DNC. On some it was changing Parameter 128 from 0 to 1 and I was good to go. The parameter depends on the machine tool builder, but I can't imagine that there still isn't one for the 18i, etc. Craig was also able to provide info on adding memory chips to the controls to get WAY past the 120 feet of paper tape memory that came installed.

JM2C

[Storkman]

we can drip feed our 18i's in tape mode with the io port set to 0. But the cards work better. Less hesitation.

[Ocean Lacky™]

how big is the hard drive? ours came with a 40 gig. we use filezilla to drag and drop via FTP. The memory card works well, also.

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

Memory cards work great. OUr customers use them all the time as Dataservers. There are some instances where it's not as good as a dataserver but I've only ever seen mold guys run into where they can;t get what they want feed-wise out of it. But they were still cruising at a couple hundred IPM.

[keith mc.]

got it figured out. in the offset setting page right arrow key(soft) page down, DNC has to be ON . thanks again for all your help.