In today’s Quick Tip, Brad will teach you how to download programs to your CNC machine using Cimco’s DNC-Max software.
Video Transcript:
If you’ve seen our product review of the Simco software we recently bought, you know it has helped us be more efficient and clean up a lot of our electronic mess. One of the items we talk about is how much easier it is for us to draw a program into machines. Today, I’m going to show you how.
If I’m an operator and I want to start setting up for my next job, I need a program to run the machine to make the part. We name all of our programs after the part number that we’re making, which is information found on our traveler. I’m going to grab my traveler and look for the program. In this case, we’re pulling out program “test123.”
I’ll go over to our list of programs in the machine. These are all different things that we could run right now. One of them is a search program to tell Simco what we want, and that’s program 80001. We’re going to open that. Inside 80001, there’s not a lot of code; it’s just a search function to grab the program that we want.
For Simco to know what we want, we have to tell it. When we send this program to Simco, the “xget” at the start is a trigger to tell it, “Hey, I’m not a normal program. I don’t run parts; I want you to look for a program so we can send it back to the operator to run parts.” Simco sees the “xget” and starts reading everything after it as part of the part number, ignoring spaces and some selected characters.
Our test program is “test123.” We need to edit it and input it to save. Now we can go back to our list. To check if your edits saved, you can go back in. Ours did, showing “xget test123.”
To send this message out to Simco, we go to IO and use an RS232C port hooked up to a Moxa box to send and receive electronically, eliminating the need to move sticks back and forth. We’ll start with RS232C, click output, and select program 80001, our program call. We output the program to tell Simco, “This is the program I want.”
Type in the search program 80001 and hit input. You should see it highlighted. Once you hit input, you have a certain amount of time to input what Simco found. After communicating, it should say “input complete.” If we go back to our list of programs, you’ll find the one we searched for, “test123,” is now in there.
Simco isn’t just for Swiss; you can use it on all different types of machines and in different ways. The steps we went through to send and receive programs might be different if you’re running a Haas mill versus a Citizen Swiss. Sending things electronically rather than using a stick are customizable options that your Simco representative can help you with. This method is working considerably better for us than what we were doing before.
If you’re considering changing the way you send and receive programs or possibly edit them, I strongly recommend taking a look at Simco. They have helped us clean up so much of our electronic mess, and we operate much more efficiently now. If you have any questions about Simco, drop a comment, and we’ll try to answer them. Otherwise, like and subscribe.