Hi all,
I mostly just lurk on the Zone, but I've come across a bit of an issue at school with our VMC 15 with 88HS control. Is there any way to control what Z height the tool returns to after a tool change? We ran some parts yesterday and found that after every tool change the tool went down to Z0 (surface of the part), moved X&Y to the next coordinate, retracted Z to the safe plan defined by the CAM program and then fed Z into the part. This leads to gouged top surfaces and could potentially break a tool.
Even when just punching in MDI line by line after a "M6T_H_" it will go up, do the change, then rapid back to Z0. Is there any way to change it to where it rapids down to a safe plane above Z0, or am I stuck with drawing and programming all my parts with the top surface at Z-1?
Also, is there any way to change the way it handles the tool change order of operations? For example, upon finishing up with one tool, it will retract to the safe plane, spindle off, rapid up to the carousel, change the tool, rapid back down and then turn on the spindle, when instead it'd be nice if immediately after the tool change the spindle turned on so that it could spin up to full speed by the time it gets back down to the part. Or should I just program in a pause for the spindle to get up to full speed before it starts cutting?
Oh, another thing we ran into was the baud rate when drip feeding it long programs. We currently have the machine and dripper program set at 9600 baud and when it gets to dumping a lot of code (think a bunch short line segments) sometimes it can't transfer fast enough, skips the block and will crash if you let it keep going. Would we have any trouble upping the baud rate (either from dropping or incorrectly receiving data packets) or are they reliable at over 9600?
Thanks in advance!