What you all like or dislike about various controls

Not much time on okuma here, I just cann't understand why they want to be so different? Goofy G codes and no way to zero the readout.

Haas is okay except for, can't use macros, and the push buttons for feed and rapid, the knobs are so much faster on a fanuc.

Masak, reset sends you back to program begining, hard to zero the read out.

Fadal, just plain fatal.

Yasnak, nomenclature and names always seem to be funky, kinda quirky.

Fanuc only a few simple bad points, mostly things that are not activated, and rotten manuals.

I like the Mazatrols but feel like I always have to lie to the control to do alot of simple tasks

The fadal is a pretty easy version of fanuc I dont see any issue there other than the control cannot process contouring fast enough

Haas...depends on the year and version of their control. Instead of a boat load of menus they have a boat load of buttons...I like buttons.

Milltronics has a pretty decent intuative control and can handle a good amount of 3d processing and contouring...way under rated machines

Hurco control are intuative as well and I would say that the Hurco can handle contouring much like the Milltronics which is faster than any Fadal and every Haas that wasnt a SS machine. They also had alot of "hey stupid" screens

Strait up fanuc on any machine makes the operator dance to get it to do anything...twist knob, push 5 buttons, twist knob then press tool change...twist knob, press 3 buttons, twist knob then press start.

Mach 3 control is super easy and can be extremely fast with the right pc but has to be setup right.

Dicer! I don't have enough time or space to properly or thoroughly explain how Okuma's Thinc controls are by far superior to any other brand on the market. They are more powerful, adaptive, versatile, and user friendly than anything else you'll find. Nobody ever believes this at first and older fanuc guys or whatever brand they are familiar with ever admit it is head and shoulders above the rest. The only thing I can tell you to prove it is research it yourself. Find either a local distributor or Okuma or a shop nearby that has one and get someone expierenced to demo the control. I speak mainly of the p200 thinc control, windows based and amazing capabilities! Check it out! You need the one that makes you the most money!

james siffel said:

Dicer! I don't have enough time or space to properly or thoroughly explain how Okuma's Thinc controls are by far superior to any other brand on the market. They are more powerful, adaptive, versatile, and user friendly than anything else you'll find. Nobody ever believes this at first and older fanuc guys or whatever brand they are familiar with ever admit it is head and shoulders above the rest. The only thing I can tell you to prove it is research it yourself. Find either a local distributor or Okuma or a shop nearby that has one and get someone expierenced to demo the control. I speak mainly of the p200 thinc control, windows based and amazing capabilities! Check it out! You need the one that makes you the most money!

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James what about those that rely on cam systems to make the code. In our shop we use zero of the controls special functions and only set tools, wear comp, fixture offsets and load programs from cad. I dont have any experience with a Okuma. Are there customers that buy a premium okuma without running CAM and use the controls functions for programming?

Fanuc is pathetic, they have been around for 40 years and can't even write a clear easily understood English language manual. In the interest of not compromising their reliability they pretty much make the same control that they made 40 years ago, I hope that they finally run out of the 286 processor chips that they must have stocked up on. There is lots of innovation that we don't have because Fanuc as the industry leader pretty much has done nothing to advance the state of the art other than improving reliability. The old guy that runs Fanuc is in his eighties and there is some talk about his son taking over and being interested in becoming more progressive. A machine tool builder friend of mine just came back from a Fanuc conference in Japan and there was some talk about being more creative but he wasn't convinced that anything would change. Imagine if the PC had advanced at the rate of Fanuc do you think we would even have the Commodore Computer yet?

Jake

I can't say much for the software side of controls.

On the hardware side I prefer knobs and toggle switches to keypads, knobs I can reach without looking and toggle switches glance or feel for their off/on position. I have more then once changed spindle speed when I meant to change feed... just saying.

I liked JG400's post. My first machine was a 1993 Fanuc Robodrill with the straight up Fanuc control. I hauled this machine in to the 'shop' and it was about two weeks before I could get it to do anything. That was about 4 years ago. I got a new 2011 Doosan Lynx lathe back in October and the control is almost the exact thing the 93' machine had except there is a soft blue coloring on some LCD squares. Oh yeah and it came with a PCMCIA card slot. Where do you even buy that? USB too simple? Instead I load programs with the trusty RS-232 interface which is really intuitive and obvious. Go to EDIT, press DIR. Press DIR again. Up pops up DIR+. Press that. Now press OPRT. Press '->' and another obvious menu with a FINPUT which needs pressing. Then you can press EXEC. Make sure the order is right otherwise nothing happens. And don't even get me started on setting/adjusting offsets. Even rewinding a program is a PITA. Oh but fans of Fanuc like to let you know that they're 'reliable'.

Ok. Once you learn how to use it fine. The control interface is still retarded. And throw in five books of 950+ pages plus that are in English, but totally incomprehensible. By the time I figured out how to use the live tools I could have filed my part out by hand.

Okuma is good, but a few gripes:

Non standard programming format. The actual Okuma format has no real advantage over Fanuc. It's just different enough to be a pain and leave you searching for a post processor.

Many of the neat features like graphics and tool life management are expensive options.

Tool life management is far inferior to Fanuc.

I hate the stupid chuck clamp sensors that have to be set for every job.

No dedicated tool length setting routing for mills. We had to make our own program to do it.


Things that I like about Okuma:

Free use of variables in the program. I use variables all the time. If my part is deflecting and turning a taper, I can add a simple variable for the operator. Something like this.

TAPER=.005

G0 X2.0 Z5.0
G1 X2.0+TAPER Z1.0

The editor is the best I have ever used. I hate the Fanuc editor. Especially when editing comments.

Lap cycles are pretty easy. No real advantage over the Fanuc roughing cycles, but still nice.

I like the way the offsets are calculated.

I prefer a rotary feed rate over ride to buttons. (Yes, I know about using the handle to control feeds on a Haas, but it can turn into something else with the wrong push of a button.) At least on a rotary, I can't accidentlaly go from 10% to 100%by mistake. Fanucs have the rotary while Haas have the buttons.

From what I have seen of Fanuc, the Heidenhain controls I have are roughly 40 years more advanced (and they are nearing 20 years old). Is it true that Fanucs still have vacuum tubes in them? Like Microsoft operating systems, they are industry standard in use (at least in the US and Japan) but far below any absolute standard you could name. The human factors engineering is beyond pathetic. G code is like programming your Commodore 64 in assembly language. Every other field featuring human-computer interaction has gone far, far beyond that level.

A couple of things I like about HH controls (other than the human readable code) are: almost every feature is turned on by default; the logic code is readable, editable, and compilable at the control; there are many control and machine debug tools built in; the documentation is supplied online free of charge including service and technical docs; software upgrades are supplied all but free of charge ($100 eprom programming charge is typical). This set of things is not available in any other control brand I have looked at.

swarf_rat said:

G code is like programming your Commodore 64 in assembly language.

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You might want to rephrase that part.
The BASIC you might have used, but it was just a command interpreter running on the top of the machine code.
If you ran out of BASIC options, you had to go to machine language, their equivalent of assembly.
That is true today as well BTW.

Not saying to protect Fanuc either way, but their biggest problem is the UI and not it's capability.
As for human readable code, I'd ask a Chinese, Japanese, Russian programmer/operator on that one.
G-code is quite readable and is easily learned by anyone from any language background.
Know the alphabet and numbers from 0-9, you can be fluent in G-code in a day.

ewlsey said:

I hate the Fanuc editor. Especially when editing comments.

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Yup, the editor is idiotic. The funny thing is that the Mits controls are almost identical, yet the editor is probably better than even the Haas.

About the Okuma...
How do you restart in the middle of the program? Let's say lathe, beginning of 2nd tool in the program?
Any reason there is no "Wear" page on them?
Why does feedrate override mess with threading cycles?
There is also something about rapid overrides.

I don't have one, but one of my part timers loves them ...... except for those little things.
He also cannot wrap his head around the usage of G53 on the Fanuc for toolchange positions.

SeymourDumore said:

Yup, the editor is idiotic. The funny thing is that the Mits controls are almost identical, yet the editor is probably better than even the Haas.

About the Okuma...
How do you restart in the middle of the program? Let's say lathe, beginning of 2nd tool in the program?
Any reason there is no "Wear" page on them?
Why does feedrate override mess with threading cycles?
There is also something about rapid overrides.

I don't have one, but one of my part timers loves them ...... except for those little things.
He also cannot wrap his head around the usage of G53 on the Fanuc for toolchange positions.

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We have Moris with Mitsubishi controls. The editor still can't do comments. That is an 8 year old machine.

Restarts are dirt simple in Okuma. Hit the right soft keys to get to the restart. Type in the line number for the tool change. Let it search through the program then hit the "sequence restart" button on the panel. The machine will apply any modal codes above the line you restart at. It moves at the jog feed rate to the last position, restarts the spindle, and applies any offsets.

It can also do Fanuc style restarts by just using the search function and then hitting cycle start.

There is a wear page on newer controls, not on older. You just adjust the tool offset.

Lathes only have one override knob, so rapids and feed moves are both overridden by an equal percentage. Mills have a separate knob.

The threading does get messed up if you change the spindle override in the middle of the cycle. That is true on a lot of machines.

No tool change positions with the Okuma. You just send the turret to the limit. X500 Z500 will send it right to the limit with no over travel alarms. Okuma also doesn't need decimal points on every damn number like Fanuc.

There is a wear offset page on the okumas. When you have a value in wear an asterick shows up on the offset page to remind you. When you store a new value in the offset page it clears the wear value for you.

The lathes have the rapid and feed override on the same knob. A separate rapid override knob is optional and a must have in my opinion. The mills have separate knobs standard.

The newer lathes have variable speed threading meaning you can adjust the speed while engaged in the thread. They also have a variable spindle speed option to reduce chatter. Not totaly sure if it can be used while threading but it would be cool.

You can restart the program but I don't do it often and can't remember the sequence off the top of my head.

On the mills if you press feed hold while rigid tapping the tap will retract out of the hole and wait, pressing
cycle start resumes tapping the hole. Not sure if the lathes do this I haven't been brave enough to try it.

Edster said:

On the mills if you press feed hold while rigid tapping the tap will retract out of the hole and wait, pressing
cycle start resumes tapping the hole. Not sure if the lathes do this I haven't been brave enough to try it.

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This is a cool feature. Actually, Dynapath had this same feature on their controls going way back to the Delta 10 in the early 80s.

Edster said:

On the mills if you press feed hold while rigid tapping the tap will retract out of the hole and wait, pressing
cycle start resumes tapping the hole. Not sure if the lathes do this I haven't been brave enough to try it.

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Haas and Fanuc ( on my Dura ) and the Mits ( on the Mori NL ) does that as well.
Feed override is always ignored for threading and tapping, no matter what.

I guess the newer Okuma controls are different, the guy is asspuckerly cautios about threading, having a hard time believing
that feed override does not affect the thread cycle.


About the Mits, mine is an '09 vinatage, and it does edit comments character by character, individually.
Also, a truly nice feature is that any line that is edited in any way is indicated by it's line number in a different color.
I like the Mits as you can use "offset filtering", meaning you can tell it to show only the tooloffsets that are used in the active program.
I believe the new Haas controls have that too now.
Altough I've never used the Okuma controls, I have marveled at the graphics on the lathes. I truly wish the Mits had that.

ewlsey said:

Okuma is good, but a few gripes:

Many of the neat features like graphics and tool life management are expensive options.

Tool life management is far inferior to Fanuc.

I hate the stupid chuck clamp sensors that have to be set for every job.

Click to expand...

All my okumas came standard with simulation. You can select 3d solid simulation or a tool centerline sim. If you have the tool definitions set for all the tools all you need is one line in the beginning of the program to tell the sim the stock size. The only drawback is the sim runs at the actual machine speed. There is a high draw setting but it's still slow. A cool feature is the sim always runs so if you have a big part you can switch the display to the sim while its running to see where you are.

Tool life management was standard on my okumas too. My MCV has the very basic version. My captain lathe has the fancy version. Not sure on the horizontal I havent played with it yet. The tool load monitoring is awesome on the lathe. I can monitor any axis or all simultaneously. You add code in the program to turn them on or off so you don't need to worry about rapid moves messing with the readings. You can set different values for the same tool depending on what your doing. The values can also be auto set while the program is running. The control will add a percentage to each of the three values based on what you specify in the settings. Here's my favorite part....The values can be set from the program so I never have to enter them while setting up a repeat job.

As for the chuck clamp switches I set them once when the chucks were clamped in the middle of the travel. I bore all my jaws in the middle of the travel so I never have to mess with the switches. The main spindle is easy but the sub is a major pita!

Ed,

You are lucky enough to have some newer equipment than us. The P100 and P200 do now come with most of those options standard. The older U1000 and U700 controls have nothing standard. They even had monochrome screens standard just like Fanuc.

You can hit the "dry run" and "machine lock" buttons on the panel to speed up the simulation.

The tool like management is good on the lathes, but the mills are not so good. You can only monitor tool life by cut time or number of times the tool is called. Fanuc lets you count the number of holes. That is really handy for drills and taps.

The chuck switch method you use works well if you have only one lathe. We run the same jaws in 5 different sizes of chucks on 7 different machines. They have to be set each time.

Another thing that I can't figure out with Okuma is the frankly stupid tool change logic on mills. Why the hell would you ever want your machine to alarm out when you called the same tool as the one that was in the spindle, or the same ready tool as the one in the ready station? Every Okuma mill we have has a special macro and g code for changing tools. Why is that not standard?

On that same note. The Okuma mills have no way to search a program to see if the tools needed in the program are already in the machine. On our Mori with Mits, you create a "tool used list" with a push of a button and it highlights all tools used in the program and tells you if they are already in the magazine.

Also, the Okuma has no ability to stage the first ready tool when using scheduled programs. On our horizontal, we have to call the appropriate ready tool at the end of the program so that the next scheduled programs does not have to wait to change its first tool. It works, but the operator has to change it each time. I saw a Makino that had this logic built in to the pallet scheduling.

ewlsey said:

Okuma is good, but a few gripes:

Non standard programming format. The actual Okuma format has no real advantage over Fanuc. It's just different enough to be a pain and leave you searching for a post processor.

Many of the neat features like graphics and tool life management are expensive options.

Tool life management is far inferior to Fanuc.

I hate the stupid chuck clamp sensors that have to be set for every job.

No dedicated tool length setting routing for mills. We had to make our own program to do it.

Click to expand...

Okay, the finding or making of a post is a pain for lathes, not mills. As far as the prox switches for the chuck, c'mon really? What if your prox switches weren't working and the machine was okay with running even though the chuck wasn't actually holding the part?

Graphics and TLM is not an option, they are standard. Things like that make Okuma stand apart from Fansuc.

As far as "no standard programming format" that only applies to lathes and the people that are used to programming Fansuc, it is relative to the programmer.....Which would make no difference whatsoever if your post was right. If you are hard coding at the control, I cannot think of a more intuitive control to use. Get this the control has an entire keyboard, I know it's crazy talk.

Robert my ±2

JG400 said:

they pretty much make the same control that they made 40 years ago, I hope that they finally run out of the 286 processor chips that they must have stocked up on. There is lots of innovation that we don't have because Fanuc as the industry leader pretty much has done nothing to advance the state of the art other than improving reliability.
Jake

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After they beat the Americans out of the business, there was no one left to copy for innovation.

My all time favorite control - the GE 2000. Simple, intuitive and as powerful as the MTB wanted to make it.