Telediagnosis: the workshop space

The telediagnosis could be defined as the ability to monitor remote. His birth as a technology to the 1950s with the release is launched a project of the American Space Agency (programme STARPAHC) which was intended to develop a system of medical monitoring of astronauts. As so many other systems that they had their first applications in space, remember examples as everyday as the velcro, killed by having his real development on land, although in this case, they have had to spend years and a technological distance communications revolution to enable it to develop as an affordable method of application in the industry.

In the strict framework of machine tools, the telediagnosis has its natural development as a service "at a distance". The idea is that the technicians of the company to deal with the technical service have access to relevant information without having to move to the workstation, avoiding this way expensive, and above all unnecessary displacement of the operators of the maintenance company.

In fact, the telediagnosis is used quite some years, although for a long time was applied only to a few teams and used to get expensive. This first remote maintenance was carried out through a conventional numerical control with RS-232 connection and modem.

Currently, and as in many other fields, it has tended towards the creation of numerical controls based on PC. This has allowed to disclose this technology considerably. This new technique allows that the manufacturer of the numerical control can inspect, diagnose, maintain, and repair your client machine directly from your PC. In fact, the only thing that would be doing would be entering the "PC" of the machine (in this case, the numerical control), from another remote PC using a common telephone line. The last development of Fagor Automation in numerical controls, the FAGOR 8070 CNC, is an example of the above since it supports the telediagnosis and is a PC-based system.

This control, you just put on the market, is a system based on PC specially designed for high speed machining. It uses a Pentium microprocessor and an operating system based on Windows 95/98. The control can therefore operate with a wide range of applications for PC (both in Windows and MS-DOS), has in addition a minimum 4 Gb storage capacity. CNC offers the possibility to connect to an Ethernet network or a móden using RS-232.

The telediagnosis, or monitoring of the numerical control, can do of remote form from any PC. The diagnosis covers a complete gestión of errors, logical analyser and allows the monitoring of the resources used. To this adds the possibility to realise crossed and statistical references.
 

Elcano Is the name, acronym in this case, with which was known a project of telediagnosis of the 4 Program Mark of the European Union. The acronym corresponded to the acronyms (Intelligent Environingingment for Customer Services through Machine Remote Control) that consists in the development of a system of teleservicio that allow to the manufacturers of machines-tool provide to his customers a technical service much more agile and continued. In the project participated important companies of all Europe and had a length of 30 months, from October of the 1997 until March of 2002.
 

This numerical control has been designed to respond to the needs of machining at high speed (AVM), it has a high computing power that allows you to reach process of block times below 1 MS can control up to 16 axes and two heads.

This CNC offers also other features such as advanced look-ahead, control of jerk, horizon of N programmable blocks to avoid the collision of you tool and function HSC / interpolation "spline" which allows machining of high precision at high speeds.

New control Fagor is distinguished also by the ease of programming (incorporates a fairly complete conversational editor, based on the typical operations of a milling machine) and a very useful editing/simulation environment to verify pieces.

5) METALUNIVERS March 2002