Prototrak/RS232 cable to drive help wanted

Hello,

I am new to machining and actually just purchased another mill today!

The issue i have at hand is my Prototrak M3 on my supermax YCM-30 has been acting up with the B drive and not liking to save the programs or read the disc The controller aside from that works fine and i love the 3 axis. I pulled the box/Computer apart hoping to replace the 3.5 floppy, nope the two drives are attached. I called SWI and they only swap out the whole controllers now for huge money and only offer 90 days and the one they swap too me might not even be as good, just will load the programs

After some bantering the tech said i could purchase a cable kit #23984 and some part from a company Sabrent part # CB-RS232 a usb 2.0 to serial DB9 male cable. He mentioned with a laptop and attching these cable to the prototrak i can load and save to my laptop???? I have a external 3.5 floppy drive that plugs USB into my laptop and i am hoping i can make this work for now.

My question is: will this work? what process do i need other than plugging things in? I am hoping i can call pull from the RS232 on the trak screen and it what reads directly from the drive attached to my laptop?

Sorry for the long post just hoping i can get this to work or find a trak floppy for sale LOL

Thanks Mark

Mark it is definitely possible to send/receive programs to the machine via RS232. I had a disk drive go bad on my "rebuilt" AGE3 computer and found a new one on Ebay for under $15. SWI wanted almost $200 for same thing. It was a standard pc part, just punch in the number on your old drive and see what is out there.

PM me your email address, I'll send you a PDF file of the cad/cam/dnc manual which details how to setup the RS232 cable. It was very helpful when setting up my machine.

Thank you!

I actually have that manual in paper now just was curious on how the actual laptop stuff worked. I have not used cam only manually programmed the trak so having to type the events in all time sucks LOL

My disc drive is attached to the operating system drive and SWI will only sell me a computer refurbished for $1700 in trade for mine. I was hoping to just swap the drive but all i got was the tip to try to make the external drive via the taptop work

You're not limited to a laptop for sending/receiving programs, I use my shop desktop pc. On the pc end you will need some type of file transfer program, I use SDNC from Surfcam. It's free and very simple to use. Just set the speed, stop and date bits per the cad/ca/dnc manual. You will also need a com port or something that mimics a com port. I use a Tripp Lite Keyspan model USA-19HS USB com port emulator. Under $30 on Amazon and works perfect. For my cable I used a make your own RS232 cable kit off Ebay, 50' was $35.

On your machine's computer does it have two 3.5 floppy drives? One for control boot disk and second for programs? On my AGE3 computer these are nothing more than standard pc parts. SWI said I would either have to get another rebuilt computer from them @ $1200 or at the time they offered me a replacement disk drive @ $200. I punched the manufacturer's model number from my drive into Ebay's search and got a new one for $12.99. Same damn thing as the original!