[frog]

I am wanting to build my own driver board, need the protocols for serial com from a cam program, are they proprietary? or open. Any help would be good.

[Mike Stevenson]

Google it.

[Al_The_Man]

Whatever the CAM program does, if it uses RS232 then it conforms to the RS232 'Standard'
Which is non-proprietary.
As suggested, if you Google RS232 and also examine the architecture of UART/USART IC's it may help.
Al.

[Horsedorf]

There is the link layer protocol, ie.. how the bits are delivered on the line, then there is the higher layers.. the ones that supply semantics to the bits being delivered. I think that's what you are looking for. I would THINK those are not proprietary since the cam maker would not really have control of the devices connected to it, look to your cam software providers to provide the protocols used. Many cam packages use a step and direction line, I have no idea what any using a serial port to communicate motions would be using for a protocol.

[frog]

HorseDorf,

That is exactly what I am looking for the, commands that it sends from the controller, I do not care about the com type as it is serial cake walk, I need the protocol from the software layer that it uses, you are right on the money, any Ideas, I do not need a lesson in RS 232 protocol, I need the next layer that is being used in the Cam program and the controller. Then cake walk.

[Mike Stevenson]

Say what

[gar]

080323-0757 EST USA

frog:

I believe RS232 has little to do with your question.

Suppose we are talking about a HAAS machine as your destination.

HAAS requires your program to start with a first %. Anything before the first % is ignored. A CR,LF will work as the line (record --- block) delimiter. The first % should probably be the first character of its line, and followed by CR,LF.

The second line contains an O-number, like O5346, and may be followed by a comment defined by ( ). The O-number is used by HAAS as the HAAS internal program name.

Following the O-number line is your program G-code, etc.

In older machines a second % anyplace in the program, in any character position caused a termination of loading.

Before an ending % another O-number line will close the loading of the preceeding O-number and start loading of this new O-number program.

A second % will terminate loading. However, in newer HAAS machines a serious bug has been corrected and now you can put a % inside a comment and it will be ignored.

At least some Fanuc controls receive programs in a similar fashion to HAAS.

Other destination machines have different requirements. The CAM programs have postprocessors to create code for a specific destination machine.

In the case of HAAS you can send data with no modification to the data stream or you can use the original version of Xmodem.

.