Denford Software & Machines

We have just bought an EasiTurn Lathe, which all appears to work OK, but the Denford controller is rather limited! It has all of 4k of memory on board.

I was wondering if any of the VR software can be persuaded to talk to it? On the forum, there are only a couple of mentions of the EasiTurn at all, so I guess they were not common?

Would I be correct in thinking that the RS232 connection diagram for a StarTurn which appears to use the same 5 pin DIN connector will be the same?

Thanks in advance,

Si

Hi,

It sounds like you have an NEE control on it so VR Milling will not work.

Your only option to improve it is to upgrade the control

The NEE control appears to have an RS232 input. I would have thought that, so long as the comms protocol between the two can be 'adjusted' (with a VB app for example), the G Code it spits out ought to work similarly?

Failing that, what are my options on a new controller? I don't really want to go down the route of Mach3 - as it seems to be difficult to interface things like the tool changer and spindle drive. Is there another type that I can just bolt on and connect up and it will talk natively to it? Do such things ever crop up second hand? Can I buy one direct from Denford?

Sorry for the number of questions!

Si

If you don't want to mess with the electronics (why would you when its working fine ?) then you should be searching for all the posts on "drip feed" and "Industrial Text Editor".

eg: viewtopic.php?t=1107

As far as I know, you can drip feed large programs to a NEE control from any number of RS232 applications. (The Industrial Text Editor is a free download from here, its a DOS program we used in the olden days)

If you don't want to mess with the electronics (why would you when its working fine ?)

Well from memory when mine had NEE control you couldn't actually save any offsets when you turned the machine off (ok so my tape didn't work) and getting the serial to work is hit & miss. and no MPG.

For Mach, the spindle speed is easy for a toolchanger you will have to do some code. i.e, you'll have to take something new on board but thats no different than learning how the PNC3 works.

PNC3 was wonderful in 1983 when the ford sierra was about, they're both dated now

Thanks for the info.

This evening I got the RS232 working reliably both ways. Do you happen to know how I can persuade it to accept a drip feed? The manual does not mention much useful about the RS232. I can load a program on to the lathe then run it - but there doesn't seem to be an obvious way of getting it to run a block as soon as it's loaded?

With this working, I figure on writing a post-processor for one of the off the shelf apps which will parse the G-Code and spit it at the EasiTurn one block at a time.

If it has to be divided in to discrete 'programs', it makes the parsing more difficult (so for example, a repeat/loop does not span two programs) - but not impossible.

Si

I'm not even convinced that the easiturn will accept a drip (other than the operator )
If you're using cad/cam anything that comes out of that will be free of repeat blocks. with all the memory available in machine tools now they're just not needed.

Remove the 'L' characters from the end of the NC blocks to execute...

M03S1000L = Load

M03S1000 = Execute

Cheers Mr Magoo!

Ill give it a whirl later.

Si