[aegrimshaw]

It is a milling machine with meldas M3. . About 9 months ago screen started going off , as i am told, I have just become involved.
When we power up the machine, the screen remains dark. It does have power and the fuse is good. Looking into the back of the monitor, you can see a small light, maybe from the crt.
The controller unit in the cabinet powers up and there are various LED:s lit.. See the enclösed photos.
Is it a monitor problem , or do we need to do a general reset to get back to factory settings or some other defined state.?
How do we perform a general reset?

[MrMetric]

Sorry... Just saw this. It is probably a very easy thing to fix. First, you likely have corrupted memory. The system doesn't provide a nice message when that happens, instead it basically just has a blank screen. The curiosity here, however, is why it "sometimes worked." I'd expect a "working, working, working.... dead!" type of experience.

Anyhow, check on this board on how you reformat the memory. There are several descriptions on how to do this, but it fundamentally is pretty easy. However, you will need your backup parameters. If you don't have them, I sure hope you have a manual that has them..... The actual formatting is pretty simple and only involved placing the switches on the 161 board in a few different positions and then cycling the power a few times. I have it all documented, but I cannot get that right now. AFter you format, the screen should come back alive, but you'll need to reinitialize the system. That means loading the canned procedures (which will be in a different part of of the control, so no extra stuff needed there), uploading your parameters (again, hope you have them), loading any required macros (such as tool change), etc.

If you do not have the parameters, I would suggest that you NOT format the memory just yet. The parameters are stored in EEPROM and may possibly be retrievable, but only if you haven't reformatted.

Red cabinet. Is this a Dyna Mechtronics?

[aegrimshaw]

OK thanks , that confirms what I suspected ( I normally work with Siemens). I suspect that the machine owner does not have the parameters and I will check with him.
by the way by "sometimea worked" I meant what you say, it was working OK, then quit working .
Thanks for contacting me. I'm sure we'll get the machine running again , may be a bit of extra work but that's OK.

[MrMetric]

What brand and model machine is it?