Question about upgrading Milltronics Mills

[MDowney]

Hello

We have a Milltronics VM24 mill that we would like to upgrade with a hard drive and a network card. Can anyone offer some advice or guidance on how to accomplish this?

Regards
Mark Downey
American Injection Molding
American Extruded Plastics

 

Most CNC controls (not all) are closed architecture, so you need somebody with the smarts to go in and hook up everything. There are really no out of the box solutions that I'm aware of. Be careful about putting a hard drive onboard, however. The machine's vibration can do a real number on it. You're better off just having a disk drive or RS-232 port wired in, and if you've already got the RS-232 port, you should be able to drop that over to a pc that's already networked. Depending on the communication ability of your control, you might be able to pull real-time data off the machine, which is what I suspect is what you really wanted in the first place, given the fact that you're in the plastic molding industry. ( you guys should really stop chasing those pesky tenths of seconds, it'll make you old, ha-ha!) Hope that helps you out.

 

[MDowney]

Thanks for the feedback. I should have included more information. The VM24 Mill has a Centurion 5 controller. According to the Milltronics website they have a large program upgrade package for $3500 which includes a 140Mb DiskonChip, 16Mb of RAM, and a network card. I did some checking around about the DiskonChip from M-Systems and I believe this can be done for a lot less than $3500. I am looking for some information about how to set this up.