Bridgeport EZTrak Series 2 - CNC10 v2.36 W/CNCLinux V2.3 <Resolved>

[TechBob]

First time poster here. I'm the repair tech for a small equipment company in Oregon, and we have an old Bridgeport EZTrack series 2 that has a problem I have been unable to figure out. The first occurance of this problem was last Friday, and we have been unable to get the CNC10 system up since. At startup, the machine goes through the usual startup sequence. When the CNC10 Starts, we get an immediate error and it stops. Nothing we have done has had any affect on this, and I can't make heads or tails of the error message.

Message reads:
CNC10 Start Menu V2.36
***An error has occured!***
Dual port base address = fd9ff800
Int overflow
parse line# = 0, exec line# = 0, current state line# = 0
This exception occured while doing a background task

Please report this error to your dealer

*****************************

As I know very little about this system, I'm not sure what information I need to include. The CNC Linux system is very foreign to me, and I'm trying hard to get what little information I can out of it. We have had the machine for the last 4 years, an bought it used with tooling from another shop. Until now, we have never had an issue with this machine. We also have 2 EZ Trak series 1 machines that I have fixed various things on over the last 5 years (servo motors/encoders, servo drives, encoder cables, etc), so I have some background on the repair of CNC mills. I'm an electrician/ electronics repair tech with 30 years of experience in various motion control fields, and have extensive working knowledge of everything from PCB design and repair to troubleshooting industrial equipment.

I have checked the incoming power to the machine, verified that the PC is connected correctly, and that the proper voltages are present on the power connector from the switching power supply that feeds the DC310 unit inside the cabinet. I've tried to read through most of the forum posts and TB's, but not knowing what the problem deals with has made it hard to narrow the scope.

I appreciate any and all assistance you might give to help me figure this out.

Thanks,

Bob


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[cncsnw]

The problem is almost certainly on the PC side, and not related to the DC3IO unit or other CNC components.

An "Int overflow" exception when it tries to run CNC10 suggests either faulty PC components (CPU or memory); or corrupted executable files; or corrupted data files.

If you press F4 from the Start Menu, or Alt-F6 from anywhere, does it successfully open up a command prompt window?

Are you familiar with any basic Linux commands like "ls", "cd", "rm" and "date"?

Having the date on the real-time clock reset to something decades earlier can cause surprising issues. Usually those can be resolved by removing the "cnc10.tem" file, or by correcting the date and time in the BIOS. Of course, if it is losing the date and time, that is probably because you need to replace the motherboard battery.

Do you have any Report files that you or an operator might have saved back when the machine was running correctly? If so, and if the problem is a corrupted data file (such as cnc10m.prm, cnc10m.cfg, cnc10m.wcs etc.) then restoring that previous report might help.

[TechBob]

Thanks for the reply. I replaced the CMOS battery a couple of days ago, and I checked through all of the BIOS settings as well. After reading your post, I moved the cnc10.tem file to a different directory to see if it had any affect on the issue. It now starts up normally and so far has run without error. I'm going to let them run a few jobs and make sure that it's back where it needs to be before I take backup of it.
I can't thank you enough for the help on this, I don't know that we would have found the answer without your expertise. If you're ever in Oregon shoot me a message, I'd sure be inclined to buy you a frosty beverage or six!

Bob