We recently got an old dinosaur of a machine in our shop, a Hitachi EDM wire machine..1988 model I believe, and I have to get it hooked up. It came from one of our sister plants. I know that it was hooked up with a network line or serial line (not sure what you call this). It looks like the cord that runs to a printer, plug is about 2" long and 5/16" wide.
At the other plant where it was hooked up before, they had it set up coming out of the pc and going into a type of channel selector box. This box has A, B,C,D on the front with a switch, and the corresponding ports on the back coming out. At one time, they had two machines, so I think this is why they used this selector box. We now have just this one machine, so I don't really see the need to even use this box. Is that correct?
Basically, I need to run the network line directly from my pc to the edm machine (I think) in order to be able to communicate with it. Problem though is that I use my port like this on my pc. I have a printer that still uses this type of connection. I assume that a USB cord could be used for the printer in place of the cord that looks like a serial line, but I'm not sure.
If I have to keep the printer hooked up this way, I think I may need some sort of pigtail or dual outlet type cable. This way, one line will come out of the pc and split into two, one for the printer and one for the communication line going to the edm. Not sure if it knows how to distinguish between the two, or if this is where I need to maybe deploy the switch selector box. For instance the line would come out of my pc and go to the box..channel A would be the printer and channel b could be the network line... What should I do here?
Last but not least, my pc is windows 7. Is there any conflict here? I see another thread right here on the main page where someone is having issues with com ports or something.
I'm programming with Mcam X5.