alt.hn

6/12/2026 at 2:41:40 PM

My Struggles Talking to an Old Piece of Junk (Fanuc 0M)

https://3nt3.de/blog/fanuc-0m-rs232-struggles

by rmoriz

6/12/2026 at 4:22:54 PM

It beings back memories, I was learning CNC machining mainly on Fanuc machines. They were old, reliable, but ultimately quiete crude machines. When for the first time I was working on a modern Sinumeric milling machine, I was amazed how user-friendly it was. Instead of writing g-code by hand, user could just use a menu to choose operation to perform, like machining an island or a pocket. You could say that Fanuc felt like C, and Sinumeric like Python. Well, not 1:1, but close enough for analogy.

The article though, it's an interesting read, but I hoped for more technical details. It ends abruptly too, so I hope for a continuation.

by Vedor

6/13/2026 at 9:45:17 AM

Sorry for the weird ending, people pressured me into writing down exactly what I did to get it to receive data and I haven’t had the time to continue it haha

Didn’t expect it to land on HN too

by 3nt3

6/13/2026 at 6:41:06 AM

Same here. "Old piece of junk"? They were all we had!

(Kids these days...).

by pseudohadamard

6/13/2026 at 9:46:28 AM

It’s all we have nowadays too! Who can expect a 20 year old to have enough money to get anything better haha

by 3nt3

6/13/2026 at 1:49:39 PM

For a second I read 0M as the number of parameters

by customerservise

6/12/2026 at 5:07:57 PM

Another problem with these old controls is even when code is sent over serial, they are slow. Think like less than 9600 baud.

They also don't have the computing power to do adaptive or other modern tool paths.

by chiffre01

6/12/2026 at 5:44:08 PM

Is 9600 baud a real problem realistically? That’s still at least 10 gcode commands per second, right?

If your CAM software is smart enough to use arc commands instead of using line segments, I don’t really see a tool path where you would need more than that.

by echoangle

6/12/2026 at 6:29:45 PM

Depends on how complex the part is. I've seen adaptive toolpath posts get 1,000s of lines long.

by chiffre01