One of the significant problems with this machine has been the 900 lines limitation of program length. In the mid 1980's this was not a problem. There was a facility for running Blocks of 900 lines of code, but with the advent of Pentiums and Windows, this facility no longer worked, and there never was a plausible explanation. Personally I suspected it was to do with "handshaking" in the software, but others thought it was a hardware issue.

Recently I made contact with a new user in Finland, and it turns out that he is a very clever programmer, and he has been able to solve the problem, and it was a handshaking issue. I have incorporated his code snippet into a more general Visual Basic V6 program, and with his kind permission, I am offering this program for free to any DM2400 users.

It maybe downloaded from my server as a self installing program. It has been tested on Win 98, Win Me, Win 2000 Pro, XP and Vista.. I am very confidence it will run on Win7. Using a USB to serial adapter on a laptop is at best hit or miss. See the User Guide.

When you download it you should execute it and it will install itself. Most things go into a folder - C:\CNC. You should browse this folder and read the short User Guide.

There is also a sample test program with three short blocks, as well as the User Guide

In addition to this, if you use SheetCam as I recommended, I have written a post processor which includes the Block command and will break long programs into blocks. While this is in the final stage of testing, I have included it in this package. Copy it to your SheetCam Posts folder.

The installation file is available from my server at: http://rexswensen.dyndns.org:81/ Note that the server is not always up.

Setup-DM2400 Windows Downloader Program V2.12.exe Execute this file to do the installation.

Good luck with this and let me know how it turned out.

Best regards .................. Rex Swensen, Sydney