A new software development by Seiki Systems enables remote monitoring of problems in real-time such as tolerance drift or failure to maintain machining limits that can occur.
A new software development by Seiki Systems of Brighton enables remote monitoring of problems in real-time such as tolerance drift or failure to maintain machining limits that can occur, particularly in unmanned or limited manning automatic machining cycles and the capture of information required for fully automatic compilation of SPC data. Maintains general manager David Trowell: 'When a machine tool is equipped with electronic probing, the data is normally collated from its part measurement cycles and stored in the control system. The probe initiates offset corrections and the machine will stop if the part is produced out of the set tolerance parameters.

This means to monitor what is happening, or determine trend information, the operator has to scroll through pages of screen data or print out the probing history.' The Seiki Systems in-cycle probing software, which is part of the Network Manufacturing System (NMS) machine tool monitoring system, uses the RS 232 output compatible interface that operates through the serial port of the machine tool control system (DPRNT) and automatically polls any probing data for capture as an electronic file.

Because NMS works in real time and already holds information relative to which job is being produced on any particular machine, it is able to collate the data as a continuous audit file and despatch it through wireless or traditional hard wired data transmission to a remote PC.

Once captured, the data can be used to initiate a call to the machine of a setter or inspector informing of a pending problem such as tolerance drift into preset warning limits or activities that are building to indicate a pending tool failure.

An important element of the data captured is the ability to pass it to a remote SPC system for automatic calculation of trend analysis or compilation of batch records.

It can also provide supervision or production engineering with valuable tool life/cost data for tasks such as process investigation and tool trials.