machine monitoring

I've got a question here that may sound crazy but here goes.....

This is what I'd like to be able to do:

I have a CNC milling machine hooked up to my PC. I have the CNC program sending out info to the PC at the end of every part cycle. I use the machine's internal part counter and timer and it outputs the cycle time of each part.

"PART 20 of 5000 CYCLE TIME- 430 SEC."

At the end of every cycle the software on the PC receives this info and creates a new txt file, naming it NEW1, NEW2,......

NEW "PART 20 of 5000 CYCLE TIME- 430 SEC."
NEW1 "PART 21 of 5000 CYCLE TIME- 435 SEC."
NEW2 "PART 22 of 5000 CYCLE TIME- 440 SEC."
NEW3 "PART 23 of 5000 CYCLE TIME- 428 SEC."
ETC.


What I'm looking to do is have the most recent part number/cycle time
be dropped into a specified cell in excel and overwrite the previous info.
I only want excel to deal with one cell and the most recent info.

The 2 things I don't know how to do are:

1.set-up the cell to only "hold" the most recent input,and overwrite the last.

2.set-up the cell to either "look" to the next text file during refresh(NEW1, NEW2,ETC.)
or delete the file it just imported info from so that the next file created by the CNC will be the same
name as the previous.

If I can somehow get this to work I can send production info to our electronic bulletin board.


ANY help you could give me would be greatly appreciated


Thanks,

Scott

I'm sorry if anyone also read this thread on the new users forum, but after posting there, I thought this might definitely be a question for advanced programmers


I've got a question here that may sound crazy but here goes.....

This is what I'd like to be able to do:

I have a CNC milling machine hooked up to my PC. I have the CNC program sending out info to the PC at the end of every part cycle. I use the machine's internal part counter and timer and it outputs the cycle time of each part.

"PART 20 of 5000 CYCLE TIME- 430 SEC."

At the end of every cycle the software on the PC receives this info and creates a new txt file

NEW "PART 20 of 5000 CYCLE TIME- 430 SEC."
NEW1 "PART 21 of 5000 CYCLE TIME- 435 SEC."
NEW2 "PART 22 of 5000 CYCLE TIME- 440 SEC."
NEW3 "PART 23 of 5000 CYCLE TIME- 428 SEC."
ETC.


What I'm looking to do is have the most recent part number/cycle time
be dropped into a specified cell and overwrite the previous info.
I only want excel to deal with one cell and the most recent info.

The 2 things I don't know how to do are:

1.set-up the cell to only "hold" the most recent input,and overwrite the last.

2.set-up the cell to either "look" to the next text file during refresh(NEW1, NEW2,ETC.)
or delete the file it just imported info from so that the next file created by the CNC will be the same
name as the previous.

If I can somehow get this to work I can send production info to our electronic bulletin board.


ANY help you could give me would be greatly appreciated


Thanks,

Scott

Hey, ace,

Please read the Forum Rules, and then choose one forum to post your threads.

Hi Scott. There is not a concise way to do this in Excel. The following uses two instances of Excel. One instance runs a workbook that watches your folder. (The folder that will recieve the files from the CNC machine). This workbook sends notification to the visible workbook that displays the updates you are wishing for.

I am assuming that the only files within a single folder will be those created by the CNC machine. If there are other files, we will need to adjust for that.

See the attached zip file that contains two workbooks created by following the instructions below.

Create a workbook named "CNCCycleWatcherHelper.xls", Add a standard module and place this code within:

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Save and close this file.

Create another workbook named "CNCCycleWatcher.xls". Add this code into the workbook class:

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Add a standard module and place this code within:

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There are three mandatory and one optional arguments passed to a procedure named "StartWatch" located in "CNCCycleWatcherHelper.xls". How you assign value to these args is up to you. In this example and the attached zip file, I created some variables to make it plain and stored the values in cells to make it easy.

The full path to "CNCCycleWatcherHelper.xls"
WatcherHelperFullName = ActiveSheet.Range("A14").Text
The full path of the folder we are watching.
WatchThisFolder = ActiveSheet.Range("A12").Text
The interval to check for updates. This is an optional argument with a default of 500 milliseconds.
PollingInterval = ActiveSheet.Range("A16").Value

The other mandatory object is a reference to the workbook itself. This reference will not need editing.

The names of the workbooks are not essential, but the first two arguments above are essential.

The code in the hidden instance should actually be packed into an activeX.exe. If you have any VB coders on site, they should have no problem placing the code into VB with minimal editing. This would allow you to use events which are more dependable than application.run.

Download the attached for guidance.

Let me know if you have any problems...

Thanks for replying Tom. I'll try it out today and let you know how it turned out.