Hypertherm HD4070 Rev.1 - Manual (Page 278)

APPENDIX E – COMMAND THC AND CNC SOFTWARE – SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION
e-4 HyPerformance HD4070 Instruction Manual
CNC serial interface
The table below is intended to give you an idea of what commands and status information can be transferred over
the serial link. This information is not sufficient to develop software from. If you are planning to develop software to
interface to the HD4070 then contact Hypertherm engineering directly to get the most up-to-date and detailed
information. Hypertherm has already developed a low level DLL (dynamic linked library) that will provide the basic
plasma system interface to any PC based controller.
Guidelines
1. The plasma system is always “in charge of” the serial link: the plasma system (PS) software can decide at any
time to ignore input from the remote user interface (CNC) and take commands from its local console instead.
2. The CNC initiates all message exchanges: the CNC sends a command or query message to the PS and the PS
returns a response message. The CNC’s wait for a response may time out, in which case the CNC can re-send
the message.
3. All messages are framed with a start-of-message/end-of-message character pair.
4. Only ASCII bytes will be transmitted. All messages include a two byte checksum.
5. No text for display will be transmitted. Error messages and process descriptions will be enumerated in a file
shared between the PS and CNC software.
Message Format
The generic message format will be:
– start-of-message character (1 byte);
– message identifier ( 3 bytes );
– data (variable length);
– checksum (2 bytes);
– end-of-message character (1 byte).
Commands from CNC to PS
HELLO – ask PS to indicate that it is responding to serial messages.
Response Data – hardware identification string, e.g. “HD4070”
VERSION – get current PS version information.
Response Data – (code version) (database version) blank delimited
GET_STATE – get the state of the PS
Response Data – number representing the machine state.
LAST_ERROR – get most recent error code
Response Data – error code from Chris’s list of triaged warning/error conditions
REMOTE_MODE – request a change to remote mode
Response Data – (none) – respond with actual mode achieved.
GET_STD_PROCS, GET_CUST_PROCS – request for all [standard |custom] processes for specified material and
thickness.