Hi,
I’m looking for advice regarding a 1989 fadal vmc 4020.
I’ve had the machine a few months, I bought it to expand my home workshop (that I hope to turn in a small business) unfortunately its turned into a bit of a communications nightmare.
I picked the machine up from a big aerospace workshop where it was on a network using predator software to send to and receive files. It came with an rs232 to Ethernet cable adaptor but I was told I could just unplug and run a cable straight into a desktop. So that was what I had hoped to do and when I had a bit more money get a calmotion or similar usb dnc device. But I’ve tried as many cable configurations as I can find recommended from the fadal manuals to the forums unfortunately usually i get the same error “Could not communicate with the CNC controller” in one configuration it was just processing and didn’t get any further and the machine didn’t receive any data. This has all been using NC fadal software, I also have a trial of surf cam but can’t get that to play ball ether. Im typing TA,1 then enter to get the machine ready to receive data and both the computer and controller are set to a baud rate of 4800. Any help trouble shooting this would be great?
My second problem is one I caused myself getting impatient whist trying to figure out the first problem, I was running the diagnostic tests to see if there was a fault on the machine side as fair as I’m aware the rs232 diagnostic was fine so I moved on to the memory checks they also came back fine but I have wiped the memory and now get a “MEMORY ERROR AT 90000H, RELOAD PROMGRAM” message on start-up is this just that it needs a program loaded or have I deleted anything integral? I have things like backlash settings from previous memory checks written in the maintained file and have gone through and set the machine up as before. I have been back through and set as much as I can back to normal but it seems even the interface is different now, before I had command prompt and could hit manual and it would go through to set menu but that seems to be gone now and I only have command prompt which isn’t too much of a problem I’m just concerned that I’ve changed to much?
Cheers
Louis