Having been laid off from my latest EE contract job, I suddenly have time to play with my VF2SS... Over the past summer, a lightning strike fried the controller and in the several weeks of dicking around with the replacement boards getting the machine back on-line I made some discoveries....
The first of which is that the Haas control software is really DOS8.2 (from 10+ years ago, which incidentlly explains why their ethernet stack sucks but I digress). DOS runns a shell app that starts automatically upon booting. The controller is an i386 or i486 pc104 motherboard.
The service tech left the fried board's harddrive with me overnight when he was shipped the wrong replacement hardware; I removed the disk and mounted it as a data drive in a windows PC, saw the disk structure (the DOS was a suprise), downloaded the files directory off of it which had all of the NC files on it, put them on a USB memorystick (the USB interface I was forcebly upgraded to turns out to be a wonderful thing), and put them back into the machine.
This has me thinking about developing 3rd party utillity software for the Haas.
1.) Would people purchase a package that allows for simple 1-button backup of a hard drive's directory containing all of it's NC files to USB?
2.) would people like the machine to be able to run a real keyboard/mouse and have a real editor with mouse highlight/cut-copy-paste capabillities? It would take running a cable from the rear box to the controller, a bit os SW and not much else
3.) is something already available to do this?
4.) What is a reasonable price for this?
crayner