Aurburg Multronica controllers use the now-defunct 3.5″ floppy disks to store machine setting information, with no easy way to create backups and floppy disks vulnerability to damage from both mechanical wear and tear and outside elements the risk of losing important information is very high. We decided to attempt to convert our Multronica controllers to use the much more resilient solid state storage.
The Problem
The Arburg Multronica controller is used on a large range of Arburg plastic injection moulding machines. Its uses a slightly modified 3.5″ floppy drive and standard 3.5″ floppy disks to store setting information. The disk medium is highly sensitive to dust, condensation and temperature extremes and is vulnerable to magnetic fields all of which can be found in most machine shops, ours is no different.
The Solution
We decided that to ensure the smooth running of our moulding machines we needed a better storage method, solid state storage. We set out to find a system that would allow the floppy interface to be connected to some solid state storage medium, USB stick or SD Card. There are many emulators / converters claiming to be compatible with “all” moulding machines but these are usually Chinese made floppy emulators only really suitable for use in computer systems using standard MS-DOS formats.
We found a supplier based in Italy that would fit a drive but requiring an engineer from Italy for 2-3 days and the cost of the drive itself the cost was simply too high.
With some more investigation we discovered the HxC2001 project, a floppy drive emulator based on a reprogrammable micro-controller. With the help of the HxC team we developed new firmware that allows communication with the Multronica controller.
We have now installed the Floppy emulator in all our Multronica Controllers and we are now working on a version for the Arburg Selogica controller for later Arburg Moulding machines.
If you have an Arbug Multronica controller and would like it upgraded please feel free to contact us for a quote
