Remote diagnostic
Remote diagnostic is a must now a days. All CNC machines must be able to undergo remote access to undergo diagnostic and it must be two way. The problem mostly with remote diagnostic is it has to be two way and you have to have a qualified technician or an operator who is well verse with machine operations and its features, always on your machine he must be trained on how to be able to recover from lost of communication and the most important is to be able to engage E-stop when needed. The remote operator is a trained technician as well and knows a procedures and protocols that will help prevent accidents that can harm both man and machine. Mostly remote access is good for updates and upgrades, training and assistance needed. We offer the first year as free to make sure we can get the customer up an about during the learning curve on how to familiarize with control functions. We also need a land line or cell phone to be able to have a voice interchange. We use Webex for remote and another pc laptop or desktop as a dedicated bridge with controls that run with older versions of Windows such as windows XP. The dedicated PC is primarily secured as level four security compliance and must be turned off when remote diagnostic is needed. You can add assign a dedicated that is level four compliant as part of the control you will have two computers one on standby for remote diagnostic primiraly use for remote diagnostic, another for CNC function.
In regards to data collection new CNC’s are monitoring activities such as error messages that are categorized in different areas. This can be with the communication between PLC’s, CNC and station cards, lost of communication or timing problems errors common with the system, CNC errors due to plc warnings and prompts, operator prompts to name a few. Mostly this is error messages have a day and time stamp so it can easily be cyphered if the condition of errors are intermittent or consistent. We can all set up the option of recording what nc programs are run and how long it took to complete a job. It can also be set to count the number of hours the tools is used. Since this is a text format you design a spread sheet that can put them in named cells. The extent of data is a chosen through the logging option and in our case is stored in the Logging directory. It helps with monitoring intermitent problems and monitor if this is a NC program error, System error, human error, machine problem etc. It is a must now a days for ease of data gathering for management and troubleshooting.
