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Old Philips 3000 series (3480)

Lazar

Plastic
Joined
Feb 20, 2023
Hello
I'm new to this forum and I'm glad to be with you.
I am asking for your help with the old philips 3480 (3000 series) control for the cnc lathe.
I want to connect it to my laptop via usb to rs232 converter. I need a pinout for making a cable from the machine DB25 to rs232 and how to set the parameters in the machine and in the cimco edit program for sending.
I can't figure it out.
Thank you for your help
 
You are in Serbia? You need someone local who understands rs232 and who is willing to spend some time with you and your machine. I'm assuming you have parameter list for your machine? I also assume that if someone on this forum has the same controller, they would have spoken up.

DB25 is the old standard for rs232, so one would think that it is the standard pinout (look it up on Wikipedia). You can get an adapter to take it to a DA9 connector, which is what all the USB-rs232 converters use. Buy a breakout/indicator box like this so you have some idea of what's going on. You might need a null modem, but you might not. Then you have the pleasure of futzing around with it until it works. Really, that's how it's done.

It could be easy, or it could be difficult. Everything is maybe in rs232: your controller may be DTE or DCE; maybe (likely) hardware handshaking will work, maybe (likely) software handshaking works too. Maybe the drivers for your pc work well with your USB/rs232 adapter, maybe not. Maybe null modem, maybe not.

In my own case, I couldn't get the first USB adapter to work with my Mac (the Mac would send data continuously regardless of handshaking). A different brand worked great: both HW and SW handshaking worked. I could load/unload files, but I couldn't get drip feed working. Then my cad software demanded an mac operating system upgrade, after which I had no working handshaking again (with either adapter). So I did the transfers with an SD card and an arduino (no more operating system updates). At 4800 baud, you can see hw handshaking working using the leds on the breakout box (they flash). The arduino allows you to see the sw handshaking working. It still took me months to figure out that drip feed would only work with SW handshaking (any time HW handshaking is on it fails AND HANGS after some random number of bytes). So now all is good, but it was a beep to get here. That's the way it is. And it will be different for other machines.

Rs232 was one of the first widely used communication protocols. The designers had no idea how it would eventually be used (hence all the useless modem lines), so the "standard " mutated and became incomprehensible. And since the standard was incomprehensible, MTB's changed it any way they felt like, and that's how we got where we are today.

If you are willing to get the required adapters and you have the parameter list for your machine, I would be happy to help you. Send me a pm and I'll help you dick around with it (not on the forum). No one else wants to watch the sausage being made (is that a saying in Serbia?).

Sorry for the rant...
 
Hi SeeFair,
I'm from Serbia, joking is a kind of obligation here. It doesn't say how to make sausages here, it's more appropriate like: what you do? "we eat shit". However, I managed to solve the problem by adding another cable between the classic rs232 cable and the machine, which has db25 connectors on both ends. With the help of the cimco program I can send the program from the machine to the PC, and with the help of the edytorNC program from the PC to the machine. One program in both directions won't work, but it doesn't matter and it's ok this way, when I don't have to overtype manually (that's a pain in the ass my friend). I will post the cable diagram in this post, as well as the parameters of the machine, maybe someday it will help someone, not to struggle as much as I did. And thank you very much for your support and advice.
 
Parameters of the machine
112-----1 (iso)
113-----1 (automatic code regognition, yes)
114-----30 (characters)
115-----1 (stop bit, 2 stop bit)
116-----600 (baud)
117-----600 (baud)
 

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