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hi there,
im using version 5.1.0.34
when i create a pgm to our master wood cnc machine - the pgm file take ages to create.
when i create it to our other machine - scm pratika it doesnt take as long. almost instant.
any reasons why its doing this to only one particular machine?
thanks
I have been using Enroute 5.1 now for about a year now and I have the following observations. If the files you are generating have a lot of 3D contours then there will be a lot of code and so naturally it will take longer times for the G-code to generate. That being said, I have found that Enroute 5.1 is poor at handling large files and bogs down very easy. I was told by an Enroute rep that we needed to upgrade to version 6 as it has been designed from the ground up to handle these things better. Version 5.1 was built on an older kernel which was in much need of upgrading. IT was several years old when the size files we now have were not envisioned.
We often have to import complex STL's and convert them into Enroute reliefs. IF the STL's are much bigger than 25-30 MB the software becomes unusable. We have actually had to outsource some jobs because the boss does not want to upgrade and we could not complete them at the required accuracy without dumbing down the file resolution to make the files smaller. It seems to me like Enroute also relies heavily on the GPU memory. The card we have in that computer has 1 GB of memory and Enroute is still not able to keep up graphically. It may be because it is not a workstation card and Open GL is not fully implimented. Just speculating here.
Where are you saving your pgm file? With earlier versions of Enroute (3 and 4) I used to save all of the files I created (both the Enroute's rou files and the machines g-code) directly to network folders and all worked fine. But when I upgraded to version 5 saving and opening files directly to and from the network takes ages. Then I discovered that if I only accessed files locally, saved directly to the HD, the file access times were almost instantaneous by comparison. I can manually copy the files from the network to my hard drive and open/save them in a fraction of the time it takes to access them directly using Enroute. I do not know what sort of bug they introduced in Enroute 5 that is causing this, but I strongly feel that it is in fact a bug, because it did not behave this way before in Enroute 3 or 4. And this isn't a networking problem either because no other programs on my pc have any difficulty accessing files saved to the network. I had mentioned it to SAI before, a long time ago (before 6 came out) and they kind of blew me off.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Todd Zuercher
all being saved and created to (local) drive.
i think its has something to do with the .pst file as it has multiple machines set up in there - not just the one machine.
i need to see what's in the file but I can as I don't have the required pgm to open it.
When you say different machines do you mean different cnc machines or different computers.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tim2020
CNC machines of various ages will have different amounts and speed of RAM in their controllers. And many will use older slower CPU's than what you have in your computer. Machines that are more than 10-15 years old will have a lot less memory and it will be quite a bit slower than what you are used to across the network and on your programming computer.
They also will have different and aged network interfaces. Some of the older CNC machines even intentionally had very slow network interfaces to make sure they were compatible with even older methods. In the really old days the controllers had so little memory that the code often had to be "streamed", but they called it "dripped" back then, because larger programs could not fit into the CNC controllers RAM. The older CNC machines also used weak CPU's to save money which could not make file transfers very fast. This was pretty common until about 15 years ago. They were using weak embedded CPU's because they were cheap.
You wouldn't think that it would take that long for the PC to output to different post processors unless there is some problem with entries in the registry that are slowing it down. We only have one CNC router and Enroute is setup just for that machine so the G-code files are local on that PC and very fast. With several machines it could be the files have to transfer to a different file server for the network of CNC machines or they could all pull the code files off your local disc. Don't know how it is setup. The post processor output is done by Enroute I assume and should be a seperate process than file transfer. IS it this or the file transfer that is slow.
Also, when doing 3D stuff in Enroute 5.1 with file sizes over 20MB things can get pretty slow. I am using an core i7 with 8gig of RAM and Windows 7 for programming and a 1GB GPU and I often run out of memory in Enroute 5.1. I don't know if this is GPU memory or main memory.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Quote:
Originally Posted by Hezz
sorry i was meaning that i have 2 post files in EnRoute that i can create a pgm for.
for the master wood and for the scm machine.
no pgms are being sent straight to the machine from EnRoute.
when i select the scm machine post, the file creates a lot faster than the master wood post. (a lot faster)
EnRoute is saved to my local drive and all the files that are getting created are also going to the local drive.
i believe it has to be something in the post for it creating really slow.
pc specs are attached