Neither of my Fanuc 6M Vertical CNC machines had a way to truly "drip feed" through the 25 pin serial port. The serial port was only used for transferring a program from an external computer into the NC's memory, and not for drip feeding commands as it is running.

It seemed the only way to run a very large program was through the old Paper Reel to Reel Tapes. After looking into the electronics of how the tape drive worked (and determining I had a bad head reader) I decided to find a way to make a Tape Drive Emulator so that I could use this machine with very large programs. I made am interface board that has an Arduino MEGA with an attached shield with a Network Port on one end, and a Multipin Ribbon Cable Receptacle on the other end. It has been in service daily for over 2 years now without an issue. It has been put to the test and the only limitation is the size of the micro SD card. With gigabytes to play with I didn't have any space limitations anymore.

Has this been a problem for anyone else? I'm trying to determine if I should document and share the information of how I solved this problem.


Barch Designs
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