Do small controller screens bother you?

I have a new Doosan with Fanuc controls, state of the art as far as I know, however the screen appears the same as something 20 years old, maybe a 13 incher. All I am saying is that if Tesla built CNC's they would have a giant big screen where I could see work offsets, tool offsets, macro offsets, program, all positions, codes, etc at one time.

Just a little rant.

Yup. It would also have several gigabytes of memory standard, and probably a terabyte or so of storage. None of this $4k for the option of a few extra megs.

Citizen's still come with 80 meters of memory as if it were 1975:

Program storage capacity: 80 m (approx. 32 KB)

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Badbascom said:

I have a new Doosan with Fanuc controls, state of the art as far as I know, however the screen appears the same as something 20 years old, maybe a 13 incher. All I am saying is that if Tesla built CNC's they would have a giant big screen where I could see work offsets, tool offsets, macro offsets, program, all positions, codes, etc at one time.

Just a little rant.

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Depends how good your eyes are!

Yes, small screens, tiny memory, archaic loading of files, etc etc are all hangups of the cnc trade.

Badbascom said:

I have a new Doosan with Fanuc controls, state of the art as far as I know, however the screen appears the same as something 20 years old, maybe a 13 incher. All I am saying is that if Tesla built CNC's they would have a giant big screen where I could see work offsets, tool offsets, macro offsets, program, all positions, codes, etc at one time.

Just a little rant.

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20 years ,,, your being way to nice ,,, Fanuc is not state of the art on the Doosans I had ,, They were warmed over 6T and 6M controls from the mid 80`s .... its like 6 or 7 key strokes just to load a program and even with Fanuc adding a USB stick to there new "F" model control you still cant run a program from it and the program size is vary small in the control ...

Fanuc is reliable and from what I have seen that is its only strong point .. but in all fairness any of the new controls I have seen in the last 20 years are vary reliable ...

Badbascom said:

...... a giant big screen where I could see work offsets, tool offsets, macro offsets, program, all positions, codes, etc at one time.....

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IMO, that would be crap to use. Too many things presented at the same time, to many places to look. I'm not needing to see some position display when I'm tweaking a tool offset. I don't need to see the offset screen when editing a program, and so on.

I've never had a problem with them. I agree with the guy above me, I don't need to look at everything at once. Although I've heard some of the Windows based controls can watch YouTube and movies. Now that's something. Lol

Brent

Forget it, I blame the whisky.

YES! It bothers me enough that it is a deal breaker. I doubt I could ever bring myself to buy a new machine with a vanilla Fanuc controller on it. They could at least spruce it up a bit so I could pretend the architecture wasn't 30 years old.

Im working with a row of LEDS!

Screens dont come much smaller. Fanuc 3TD

13" is a small screen ?


" posted from my 3" phone "

Like anything else you get used to not seeing enough information on a small screen having to page between screens to see info wanted/needed...but that is also a feature as you only see what you need.

Large screen with multiple windows of info ant any one time can be overload till you know where to look...then when you do it's the only thing you see and the info is always there.

If I have an option...large screen, more info and let me pick and choose what I want to see. Oh wait I do have that option and bought machines with fairly large displays compared to my first CNC's lil 6". But then again that 6" was a step up from the used machines I was looking at back then...1 x 3" displays with barely a few lines of code.

I'm with the not needed crowd. 13" would already be twice as big as I'm used to. Ha... and still they complain. You only look at so much at a time, and once the program is proofed who's looking at the screen anymore anyway? Sometimes I'll put the screen on full absolute position just so I can watch the numbers jump around to let's say meaningful places, but that's strictly for fun. I will agree that on the Fanuc 16-18 controls, the amount of button pushes to get a program loading is kind of retarded. Not sure what that person was thinking when they invented that route.

Has anyone here ever seen a Fanuc system 7M? One of these appeared with a Makino VMC in 1979 where I worked. The TV was actually a separate unit mounted on top of one of the control cabinets.

And was wonderful to work with compared to the no screen LED's as mentioned above for a 3T control.

Big screens offer more information density, which means less pressing buttons to see what you need to see.

At least that's the theory.

Since just about everyone apart from Fanuc are using bigger screens now anyway, this argument really boils down to Fanuc vs. everyone else.

The biggest issue with Fanuc controls is not that the screen is too small, it's that the way information is presented always sucks. There is so much button pushing required to do any basic HMI task.

And I'm talking generally, not specifically.

If I switch to MDI mode, the screen should change to MDI input, not also expect me to press the PROG key, and then the maybe the MDI softkey, depending on which specific PROG screen it was left on previously.

If I switch to auto, the screen should change to program run with DTG and modal information.

If I switch to edit, the screen should change to full screen program display.

Etc.

If It can display all the coordinate systems simultaneously, I should not have to switch to the exclusive REL position screen to set relative coordinates.

T controls, where the Y axis offset is tacked on as afterthought requiring multiple softkey presses to get to, with no way to display all the offset information on one screen.

More than 5 axis? Got to press a softkey to toggle between the first five and the remaining ones. No way to see them all together.

The right softkey to scroll through additional softkeys that you don't know are there until you have memorised the entire control UI hierarchy.

Etc.

Fanuc could work just fine with the 9-13" displays, if they just fired all their UI designers and replaced them with ones who had even a basic understanding of good UI design principles.

I'm with Vancbiker on this one. I hate big screens with too much tightly packed info shown all at once.
And, I personally feel the "less button pushing" logic is flawed. I would rather push one button to get to the info I need for the task at hand.
There is a reason haas's Coldfire-I was always touted as having the best CNC control UCI ever. Because: IT DID!
Even Coldfire-II I feel was too bogged down with junk on the screen.

I have never actually used a newer Heidenhain, or Siemens. But, I have looked at them in person and though: "god, how do people look at this mess all day?"

Even the Brother C-00 I find hard to look at compared to the perfect Coldfire-I.

gregormarwick said:

......Fanuc could work just fine with the 9-13" displays, if they just fired all their UI designers and replaced them with ones who had even a basic understanding of good UI design principles.

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It's not a Fanuc issue, but a machine builder issue. Fanuc has had control models with the ability for the machine builder to produce any U/I they want for at least 12 years. Prior to that there were varying levels of customization available to builders. Ever look at Makino's MPC2 from the mid 80s running on Fanuc 11-15 series controls? If you want to see what can be done now, check out the Fanuc based controls on Amada punches starting ~12 years ago.

I think that few machine builders opt to build a custom interface because it is not often a purchase decision factor. Sure there are a few buyers that may bypass a machine with a control that they don't like to operate, but I doubt it's really that many. If it was perceived to cause significant loss of sales, machine builders would be putting in the extra effort to make a custom U/I.

Even when a machine builder decides to build their own U/I, it's no guarantee to be great. Mori did GOP, MAPP, CELOS, and so on. None were really hailed as being super operator friendly by most I have heard from.

SIM makes a point in that what you get used to will be what you like. To some extent, I agree. Some things however just don't work out that way. I have a GOP2 on my home Mori Seiki. As part of its U/I it uses a touchscreen. Some functions on the touch screen replace what would typically be a pushbutton on the operator panel. The touchscreen works fine, but offers no advantage over a regular pushbutton so while I am used to using the touchscreen, I'd be happier if it just had regular pushbuttons. Since the screen is nearly 25 years old, I am very conscious to not touch it with wet fingers out of concerns that the old gasket along the bottom edge might let coolant leak in and cause trouble. Wet fingers on a regular pushbutton, no concerns at all.

I think both the Heidenhain and Siemens have pretty good information density out of the box. BUT then DMG MORI rolled out the CELOS platform, which adds a whole bunch of extra shit that almost nobody uses. I'm not talking about the MAPPSV controllers, I'm talking about the Siemens and Heidenhain, which just get a weird sidebar that is always visible. And since it looks "cool", now all of the premium builders are in a race to catch up and add their own suite of half-baked addons, which is leading to a bunch of two monitor setups and clunky integration.

The first thing I think of when bigger screen "anything's" come up are the idiot pre-teen kids that shoot a BB gun at their 120" TV and hit one corner... killing the whole screen.

I'd imagine that's part of the logic in keeping screen's only as big as needed. Less chance of an airborn object (broken tool, coffee cup from disgruntled boss...) doing damage and lower cost of manufacture.

I'm probably not the best opinion on the matter though. I'm still using a 30" tube TV with an occasional green spot in one corner. I've never bought a new TV, I just get all the hand-me-downs of the curb, because I'm cheap. I'm very much an opponent of the worlds view that if technology advances by 1%, it's time to scrap all of your previous tech. The average TV screen size in an American household hasn't increased year to year due to making things easier to see or otherwise making them more efficient, but because some wanted a more enjoyable "experience", and others wanted to keep up with them.

I think this is more of a machine type/number of axis issue than outright bigger or smaller screens are better.

I'd say for a straight 2/3 axis lathe the standard, or at least what I'd consider standard size Fanuc screens are big enough and I'd put myself in the camp of not wanting too much displayed at once, although it would be nice if the axis and spindle motor loads were displayed on the auto run screen and not in the position monitor screen, some MTBs obviously get around this by adding physical load meters which I'm a fan of.

I actually think a bigger issue is the rest of the interface, I have a Hardinge lathe with a 21i-T control and an Emco with a 21TB, the 21TB has a screen that is considerably larger but I actually don't find it any better/nicer to use because of that, infact I prefer the 21i-T because it has a simpler button layout and it has an MPG which the Emco lacks, I'd trade the larger screen on the 21TB for a smaller one and an MPG in a heartbeat.

I'm also not really a fan of these new and seeminly trendy enormous touch screens, it just seems like another delicate and expensive part to damage and they lack any tactile feel compared to proper buttons, switches and dials. Is a bigger screen really much bigger if a chunk of it is actually touch screen buttons which wouldn't normally take up any screen space?

Overall I think if we're talking Fanuc screen size is low on the list of problems with them, I'd rank the program memory space (or lack of) at the top that is actually a serious flaw and I suspect that has cost them a lot of sales when it comes to VMCs.

Rob L said:

I'm also not really a fan of these new and seeminly trendy enormous touch screens, it just seems like another delicate and expensive part to damage and they lack any tactile feel compared to proper buttons, switches and dials.

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Yea! I didn't even think of touch screens until you just mentioned it. TERRIBLE!
I would rather get daily prostate exams than have a touch screen on my CNC.
(and no! I do not enjoy prostate exams)