Well, I'm reaching my whits end. We run two shopbots at my shop and one of them is driving me insane.
It keeps losing communication. When I get it back online, the location is off. I know this is a common problem, and I've done a fair amount of reading in the forums. Wondering if anyone has any new ideas. I have a call in to tech support, waiting to hear back.
Here's what I have:
PRT Standard 60x144
RBK control box (bought new a few months ago)
New HP comuputer - minimal extra software. Good specs. Windows 7
Latest version of Shopbot software
Here's what I've done so far:
-Improved grounding- i have grounding wires attached to the x,y, and z axes. The wire goes to the control box ground.
-Updated firmware
-New USB cord
-Cables are not bundled together, USB is not near any other cord
-Cleaned interior of computer, built a dust proof box for it
-Tried a different computer
-My dust collector piping hangs from the steel frame of our building with metal wire. We have about 8' of flex tubing that goes down to the router. I attached the metal wire of this flex tubing to the metal support wire (which ought to go to ground, right?)
Some symptoms (or lack thereof)
-Doesn't seem to be triggered by other machinery starting up
-Doesn't seem to be triggered by long files (drops even while doing simple commands [mh, mx__, etc])
-After the error message and the software automatically quits, I cant restart the software. When I open task manager, sb3 is running in 'processes'. It is taking up 300k-400k memory. I have to force end this process before I can open Shopbot again.
-Machine will sometimes run for days without problems, or today it won't go an hour
That's all I can think of right now. I ordered a new USB card (can't find one with PCI Express locally). I had read that sometimes a separate card worked better. I had all my hopes riding on that. Today, however, I tried running the machine off my laptop. Had the same issue. So I'm no longer convinced that the problem is with the computer hardware.
We are using a new computer, and most of our issues have come since we switched. This computer is running Windows 7. Has anyone else had issues with this? Our old one was XP and it ran fine.
Phew. Time to go have a snack (or a drink). Any help is GREATLY appreciated. My company can't afford to have this machine down for long.