Did you keep the original Animatics servo controller? I have one of these mills but the only software I know of that works with it is the MS-DOS software from Light Machines. It's so antique it needs LIM EMS memory to load gcode into. Newer PCs with a lot of integrated IO have their high memory area so fragmented that even if they have a total of 64K free there's no pieces large enough for LIM EMS 4.0 (or any other EMS manager) to remap into a single piece.
One of the Calumet universities had a CAD-LAB program that developed CAM software specifically for the ProLight 2000. They had Windows, Mac, and Linux versions. (That would be Windows 9x and Mac OS 8 or 9.) There's an archive of the site but whomever grabbed it all failed to get the contents of their FTP server so unless someone out there who was involved in the CAD-LAB kept a copy, that software is *poof* gone. But CAM was all it was. It didn't directly control the PLM2000, it made gcode to feed through the crusty old DOS software. I did get a copy of a bunch of information and software for those Animatics servo controllers from a guy at Moog-Animatics. He worked for Animatics and stayed on after the merger. He found it all on an old backup drive. Let me know if you want a copy of it. One trick the controller can do, which wasn't exploited by Light Machines, is it can have gcode loaded into its internal RAM to run headless and continually repeat it. Could setup up a fixture to hold parts and a cycle start button to have the mill crank out a lot of duplicates. But Light Machines did their software so a constant serial connection is required to the control PC. If the connection is interrupted it's just like hitting the e-stop. If you've made the PLM2000 work with the Animatic controller and Linux CNC or something else, I'm very interested. I'd love to get mine working because I've not been able to find a PC old enough to be able to run EMS. Would be nice to have my old 80286 with 12 megabytes of RAM. 512K on the mainboard and three full length ISA cards. The first one backfilled the main RAM to 640K and all the rest on the three was divided between hardware EMS and XMS. Something like that, with all the extra RAM as EMS, could run some very large gcode to a PLM2000. On Friday, June 24, 2022 at 12:58:02 PM MDT, Feral Engineer <theferalengin...@gmail.com> wrote: How funny, I did a prolight 2000 with some students at my old high school. I'll be putting up a little montage video on my YouTube channel pretty soon Phil T. The Feral Engineer Check out my LinuxCNC tutorials, machine builds and other antics at www.youtube.com/c/theferalengineer Help support my channel efforts and coffee addiction: www.patreon.com/theferalengineer Order one of the coolest label makers on the market at http://labelworks.epson.com, use coupon code "theferalengineer" and receive 20% off of your order 🙂 On Fri, Jun 24, 2022, 1:45 PM Ralph Stirling <ralph.stirl...@wallawalla.edu> wrote: > Anybody have a spare 6i25 they would be willing to sell? Helping a friend > set up his Prolight 1000 mill, and discovered his SFF Dell computer doesn't > have pci slots, so the 5i25 we got won't work. Mesaus and Mesanet are out > of stock. _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
