Shuttlesworth
TJ Enthusiast
You can try this company, they make a few RS232 adapters for industry. You may find something here that will help. https://www.sealevel.com/
RS232 comm experts?
- Thread starter Mike_H
- Start date
You might double check the TX and RX lines are crossed correctly so TX on the CNC is connected to RX on the PC and the other way around. I've seen that messed up before.
Maybe try skipping the CNC software for now and use Putty or HyperTerminal to see if you are getting something readable. If you have it set right you should be seeing a prompt from the CNC each time you hit return. If you are seeing gibberish you may not have port settings correct.
Sounds like a baud rate problem - or possibly a word length/parity/stop bit setting.
Changing the basis rate throws an error immediately, so I'm pretty settled in on where that is set (9600). The word length, parity and stop bits might be adjustable. I know it needs two stop bits. It will error at one or none. Parity doesn't seem as important, and 7 is the word length (pretty common in CNC from what I'm finding)
FINALLY got this dumb thing communicating again. As @Zorba predicted above, Baud Rate was an issue. The machine was faulting at 4800, but not at 9600, so I thought 9600 would be ok. WRONG. We ended up having to go down to 1200 to get the data transfer to happen. That was issue number one. The key there was one of the guys came by while we were testing and said, "Geez, that's going a lot faster than it used to." Aha!
Once the data was transferring, it took about 2 more hours to figure out the correct Xoff character set to make the machine realize that the transmission was complete.
Just to vent a little. My company used to have a couple of VERY smart guys that took care of all this stuff. They are both gone now. They are the type of guys that are smart and know it...and ALWAYS think they were the smartest person in the room. No humility and bad attitudes. Most of the time, there wasn't any documentation written (which is why I struggled with the cable). Then, there are some random help files. There was a "help" file written to describe the set-up of the G-code transmission software. It was wrong...not obviously wrong, but subtly wrong. The kind of wrong that it makes me think it was written incorrectly on purpose to "protect" someones job.
Anyway, thanks all for the suggestions. I was at my wit's end a couple of times.
Once the data was transferring, it took about 2 more hours to figure out the correct Xoff character set to make the machine realize that the transmission was complete.
Just to vent a little. My company used to have a couple of VERY smart guys that took care of all this stuff. They are both gone now. They are the type of guys that are smart and know it...and ALWAYS think they were the smartest person in the room. No humility and bad attitudes. Most of the time, there wasn't any documentation written (which is why I struggled with the cable). Then, there are some random help files. There was a "help" file written to describe the set-up of the G-code transmission software. It was wrong...not obviously wrong, but subtly wrong. The kind of wrong that it makes me think it was written incorrectly on purpose to "protect" someones job.
Anyway, thanks all for the suggestions. I was at my wit's end a couple of times.
Now do what the very smart guys didn't... Print the serial settings on a label and stick them to the controller so when it happens years from now someone doesn't have to repeat what you just went through!
Oh, I took pictures of everything. I'll make a little help document for the future. Also told my maintenance guy to do a look across and find any other areas are might be SOL if we have a broken cable.