DRO:ddisp, the DOS-software of the DRO:

The software running on the PC is DRO:ddisp. It mainly is responsible to ask the DRO:int4 for data, switch the digital scales' modes and to display and process the data and the user input. The software is running on old PCs that are cheap to obtain. The OS running on that PC is DOS 6.22 or a current version of FreeDOS. This simplyfies setup and lowers the requirements to the PC''s hardware.

Hardware Requirements:

An old PC that fullfills the folowing requirements is enough:

• Minimum 386 @ 33 MHz
• one serial connection (RS 232)
• Harddisk with some MB space left. You even can boot and let run DRO:ddisp from a floppy.
• Floppy disk to transfer program to the PC.

These PCs, or better lap tops (they fit much nicer to your mill or lathe), can be easyly obtained for a few bottles of beer, a bottle of good whine or a few dollars. They are often 10 years old, have no CD-ROM-drive, the accumulators are worn out and they collect dust in some dark cornes. The are, wrongly, considered worthless.

Software Requirements:

The OS running on the PC should be DOS 6.22. You do not need any version of Windows®. DRO:ddisp even gets problems when you let it run under any version of Windows.

The Software:

As there is a lot of computing power on the PC, the decision to fully exploit it is obvious. So the DRO:ddisp is not a simple hard wired (or hard coded) display suitable for just one application (a lathe or a mill), but it is a display engine that is driven by macros. Those macros can be easily modified, expanded or adopted to fit any need and any setup. From conventional DROs you have learned that there are dedicated buttons for built in functions. If you need more, you are lost. But a PC's keyboard has so many keys and combination of keys, that either these combinations or your phantasy in functionality you want is the limit.

The display-software mainly consists of two parts:

• The "display engine" that handles keyboard-inputs, reads from the interface DRO:int4 and that supplies the infrastructure for …
• the interpreter. The interpreter executes macros that are either called by user input or by the display engine.

This sounds complicated? No, if you want to use the YADRO-DRO out of the box, you don't have to get into detail with this. If you want, for example, to set the X-axis to zero, you just type "Z", "X" and then <Enter>. As soon as you start typing, a list of available macros (or available functionality) pops up and shows what macros are available and selected. Of corse, you can assign function keys to macros that you frequently use.
One more advantage of the PC is, that you have plain text in real dialogs, not cryptic "letters" shown on a 7-segment LED-display.

Because the list of functionality is quite big, here are just some highlights

• Hole circles with starting angle, circle's center and number of holes.
• "Unlimited" number of tools definable. By selecting a tool (on a mill), you automaticaly set the mills diameter and the offset in Z-direction
• Automatic radius correction. The software automaticaly knows on what side of the tool you are cutting and adds/subtracts the tool's radius.
• Center between two points.
• Point sequence by giving X-, Y- and Z-increments and number of points

You also have a full fledged formula solver. No need to long for the pocket calculater to calculate things like sin, cos, tan, sqrt etc. There are a lot more things that make the YADRO-DRO different. To learn more, look here.