Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

I have this M39 control on a Manford CB185 bed mill.

The machine runs great. My concern is that 3-1/2" floppy disks are already " a thing of the past" and my thinking is to add a USB port, while it's not too late....or is it?

The CPU is a Pentium with PCI slots...not PCIE. I found a card for that and installed it, with no surprise, it didn't work. I'm sure that the board is good. but USB wasn't around in 1999 when I bought this and the computer doesn't know what to do with it. If I could get to a "C:" prompt, I could probably load drivers.

Has anyone had any success doing this...or have a new direction for me.

I don't have a "password" for the system either, but I imagine that it must be a default

The software is CNC7 v 7.08

Any help is appreciated

You can exit to an MS-DOS command prompt with Ctrl-Alt-X from the main screen, or Alt-F10 from the Utility screen.

If you can obtain MS-DOS drivers for your USB port and one or more USB flash drives, more power to you.

The default password for the CNC7 Configuration menus is "137", but there is nothing in there that will affect the inability of DOS to read USB devices.

If your control is from the 1990's and runs DOS, it is likely that your Centroid CPU board is an ISA-slot CPU7 (probably a CPU7P5S), and not a PCI-slot CPU10.

That limits your options for moving to a newer software version and operating system (i.e. CNC10 and Linux). That is not out of the question, though. An MSI MS-6368 motherboard with 512MB memory, and with its ISA slot populated (not all of them were shipped that way) can run CNC10 and Linux v2.72. That would allow you to use many USB flash drives, and would also improve the prospects for a network (LAN) connection.

mtbase, I am in quite the same situation.... Any updates?