I have a robodrill with a 16iA control. I had some problems recently and ended up with a 'ghost control' with all params deleted. Luckily on this control all the params, ladder, and even macro programs are backed up in non-volatile flash or FRAM. You lose all your customization of any parameters though, all programs, work/tool offsets, i/o settings if they're not factory, and more things that I probably forgot to list.
I recovered from that issue mentioned above but the long way.
I'm interested in using the card reader on the left side of the control monitor to back up my SRAM so that if the control needs to be wiped for some future reason, I can hopefully just load all my stuff back on they fast way.
I have tried a sandisk PCMCIA to CF adapter, with a 32mb CF card. If I try to format that card I get a 'NMI occurred please power down' alarm. I did reading on forums, found that some had luck with an old PCMCIA ATA memory card rather than using an adapter. I bought one of these cards sandisk pn SDP3B-64 which is approved for the 'i model A' controls per the below PDF, but I got the same error 'NMI occurred....' I have also read that some fanuc controls wanted to use an older style of memory that was expensive called SRAM and apparently has the form of a PCMCIA card too.
I have a PDF (attached for anyones ref) from fanuc, explaining that the particular family of sandisk ATA card bought should work in the 16i, but it didnt anyway for me. Anyone with experience with these cards think there could be something else going on wrong with my control?