[ARB]

Has anyone ever worn out their com port??

Mine worked fine last week. DNCed a 2 million line program with no problems. Today I can get a few hundred lines at best.
Tried sending to 2 different machines with the same result.
Tried another pc and everything seemed to work.

What is confusing is I can actually send some code and recieve it and use it. Just not very much of it.

BTW I'm using NC link as always.

What gives???????????/

[HuFlungDung]

It is certainly possible for it to break down. If your comp has a second one you could try that instead. If that doesn't work, then you could disable both of them in bios setup, then purchase a serial port PCI card (I think these are quite cheap) and try that instead.

[Al_The_Man]

What you could try is make or pick up a loop-back plug ($5.00) to plug into the serial port and this will cause everything going out to come back in on the screen, you can also connect pin 2,3 and disable the hardware handshake and this would also work. Do you have the hardware handshake jumpered out at the moment? If you still have the problem, try running Hyperterminal with the loopback plug to see if it is s/w related.
Al

[ARB]

Well, after some fiddling around and trying different settings I managed to get this thing working again. I'm a little baffled as to why, suddenly I need different settings than I have used for the last year. I had to switch from XON/XOFF to CTS/RTS and change from 7 to 8. Don't make sense but it works now so thats all that matters. My new laptop will be here next week and hopefully that will not present some unknown difficulties getting it to communicate with the machinery.

[tekno]

software/hardware conflict. have you added any other hardware or software?

[cadcam]

ARB, this new laptop. Have you checked to see if it has a serial port ?
Allot of the new laptops don't have them.
My really nice toshiba just over a year old does not.I use a PMCIA Com port card for mahines along with Predator DNC.
This work great.

[IJ.]

CadCam: Good point I went shopping at the start of the year for a LapTop and couldn't find one with a com port, not even old stock! (Forgot to add I needed the native com port for my Car EMS interface as it has "issues" if an adaptor is used)

I ended up getting my Sister's old P3/500 to use for the CNC machine, I believe with the DeskCNC hardware board it should be fast enough for my purposes.

[ARB]

The new laptop (HP zd7000) showed up and it looks like cadcam is right about the lack of a serial port. What is my best bet around this? Something as simple as a usb to serial adapter won't work will it? I have been thinking about going wireless with this set up maybe it is time to look at that angle.

On another note. Wouldn't it be nice if all of our cncs had USB ports so we could use all the cool gadgets available nowadays.

[Al_The_Man]

I have used a USB to com port adaptor on my laptop, so far it has worked Ok for the applications I have.
Al

[ARB]

Happy to report that the USB to Serial adapter worked just fine.
It is so nice to have real computing power on the go.

I still think it would be nice to have USB ports on cncs so we could use memory sticks for back up and what not.