DATRON next: Running a Program at the Machine

There is no mode selector on a DATRON next control, no cycle-start button, and no block cursor to park somewhere. There is one large round ON button that changes identity as the job progresses — power-up, then load, then start, then pause — and a coloured status bar that tells you what the machine thinks it is doing. Running a job here is not a sequence of keystrokes to memorize; it is a guided workflow that refuses to let you skip a step. This page walks that workflow the way an operator meets it, and covers the parts the guided screens do not explain: what pausing actually does, how to get back in after an abort, and which decisions have to be made before you press start.

The Short Version

Switch on, load, check tools, set up the part, simulate, start. The control walks you through it as the CAM wizard, and the main-menu tile shows how far along you are.

• Switch on. Main switch at the back of the machine; the interior light comes on and the software boots to the main menu. Check the spindle position in the work area, confirm the emergency stop buttons are unlocked, then press ON.
• Load. The ON button becomes Load program. Pick a memory location and a program.
• Check tools. The control compares the program’s tool list against what is physically in the magazine and the manual-change warehouse.
• Set up the work piece. Establish the origin with the XYZ sensor or the camera.
• Simulate. Graphic simulation in the 3D view.
• Start. The ON button is now Start program. The status bar turns green.

One thing the manual mentions at power-up and is easy to dismiss: after a period of downtime the control suggests a spindle warm-up. Confirm the dialogue with Yes. On a machine whose entire premise is a very-high-RPM spindle, that suggestion is the machine protecting the most expensive component in it.

The ON Button Is the Run Control

DATRON describes the ON button as “a status signal and also a control element”, and it is worth learning as a state machine rather than as a button. Its appearance tells you where you are; pressing it does whatever the current state permits.

The feed-zero state is the one to internalize. Winding the potentiometer to zero on a Datron does not pause the program; it holds the program at zero feed with the spindle live. Pressing the button from there stops motion but leaves the spindle turning until you explicitly ask for the door.

Reading the Machine: Status Bar and Message Colours

The status bar across the screen is the stack light. Learn it before your first shift — it answers “why isn’t it doing anything” faster than any menu will.

Operator messages are colour-coded on the same logic and there are only three: red for standstill or error, orange for warning or pause, blue for a note. There is no numbered alarm list to look up the way there is on a Fanuc or a Heidenhain — the message carries its own explanation, and a machine abort produces an abort message with the cause spelled out. What that means practically: on this control you diagnose by reading the sentence, not by decoding a number.

Where Programs Live

Everything the control runs is a SimPL program — a .simpl module, whether a human wrote it, a guided screen generated it, or a CAM post emitted it. Program administration presents those files across several memory locations:

Selecting a program shows its program information — author, runtime, date of last change, blank-part dimensions in X, Y and Z, and a comment — along with four actions: Tool check, Delete, Edit (opens the source in the editor) and Load program. Three status icons sit alongside: all required tools are available, the program has already been successfully run, and the program is released/write-protected. That middle icon is more useful than it sounds on a shelf of near-identical part numbers.

Two conveniences worth setting up once. A filter searches the current folder by name as you type, or searches every folder, subfolder and linked drive at once. And a Quick link pins a frequently-run program to the toolbar: the program is started and run on start, and when it finishes the previously loaded programs are reloaded. The Quick link button is disabled while a program is running.

The preview image is a completion marker. The work-piece preview picture in program administration does not appear until the simulation or the actual manufacturing has been run. A program with no thumbnail is a program nobody has simulated on this machine.

The CAM Wizard, Step by Step

DATRON’s description of the wizard is that it “guides you through the setup procedure of the machine step by step and clearly” and “clears potential source of error”. In the navigation bar the finished steps turn green; on the main-menu tile they turn white. Back and Next buttons move between steps, so you can go back and redo one without starting over.

1. Select and load program

Pick the memory location, tap the program, load it. That is the whole step — it is the same program administration screen described above, presented inside the wizard.

2. Tool check

After the program loads, the control checks that every tool it calls is actually available, and sorts them into three lists: required tools that are not in the tool magazine, required tools that are in the manual change location, and required tools that are in the tool magazine. Anything in the first list has to be loaded before you go on. A fourth control on the same screen, Measure all tools, measures them without leaving the wizard.

⚠ Danger of machine damage due to incorrect tool change procedure. Tools kept in the manual-change warehouse are generally fitted with an adapter or a limit stop ring, and the unclamping length the software holds is derived from that. If you put a different physical tool into the magazine slot the software believes is holding a particular tool, the stored unclamping length is now a lie. DATRON’s rule for the spindle is the same one: only the same tool, or a replacement with the same article number.

Two behaviors from tool management change what the tool check reports. A tool marked locked will never be changed into the spindle, and is excluded from the tool check and from sister-tool searches — and a detected breakage locks a tool automatically. So a tool check that unexpectedly reports a tool missing may be reporting a tool that broke on the last run and locked itself. Separately, if a tool type is flagged for external measurement, the automatic length check after insertion into the spindle is disabled completely for it and the length has to be typed in by hand.

3. Setting up the work piece

Establishing the origin is its own submenu, and the wizard hands you to it. The short procedure the manual gives is: traverse the Z-axis up to use the camera, then align the work piece using the measuring cycles or the camera. Two facts matter for anyone coming off a conventional control:

• The XYZ sensor changes what the coordinate display means. While the sensor is folded out, the coordinate system is based on the probe tip and not the tool centre point — and when you fold it out, the machine traverses so the measuring tip goes to the previous position of the tool tip.
• Origins are named objects, not numbered registers. The origin plus its coordinate transformations is saved as a work piece coordinate system under a name of your choosing, and you can attach a photo of the clamping to it from the work piece administration screen. The name then shows under the axis positions so you can see at a glance which setup is live.

The setup screen also carries the workholding and machine-state controls you need at that moment: vacuum on/off with the current pressure, suction head raise/lower, XYZ sensor fold in/out, compressed-air inlet and outlet pressure, safe positioning, and the live axis positions of the tool centre point, which you can zero per axis or set to a typed value.

⚠ Rotary axis. If your machine has a rotary axis, do not set its origin with the camera — calibrating with the camera overwrites the coordinate system created for the rotary axis during calibration. Use the edge (X negative) measuring cycle instead, then save the result under a new name in work piece administration. After any recalibration of the rotary axis, every saved work piece coordinate system for it should be re-checked.

The full catalogue of measuring cycles — corner, rectangle and circle centres, Z-height, edge, symmetry, U-shape, plane — and the camera draw-to-measure workflow are covered in DATRON next Control Guide; they are not repeated here.

4. Simulation

Press Next and the manufacture of the component is simulated, then shown in the 3D view. This step is not decoration — it is also the only way to populate the 3D view at all: outside the wizard the sequence is load, edit, run, simulate, and the 3D view only displays once a simulation has completed.

The 3D view gives you a progress bar you can scrub, a perspective switch, show/hide toggles for the tool, the milling trajectories, the work piece, the positions, the grid, the protected areas and the graphic primitives, plus jumps to the start and end of the simulation, between operation groups, and between individual data blocks. Protected areas are colour-coded: red for the safe areas DATRON stores on the controller (the machining table, for example), yellow for entries you activated in the protected-area administration.

5. Mill the component

Press Start program. Milling starts and the status signal goes green. From here the screen to watch is Status, which shows in real time: a progress bar for the whole program, elapsed and remaining process time, an image of the work piece, actual feed (what the potentiometer is asking for) against target feed (what the program asked for), spindle load, speed, axis positions in the current work piece coordinate system, the current tool with its data, sister-tool remaining service life, vacuum pressure and active connections, compressed air, and the coolant/lubricant setting — which you can change mid-process from that screen unless the program has specified it.

One line in that chapter is the single most important sentence for anyone running a Datron hard: if the spindle is overloaded, the machine stops and an error message is shown. The spindle load gauge is not a curiosity; it is the thing that will end your run.

Execution Options: Decisions Made Before Start

These live in their own dialogue off the main menu and, in DATRON’s words, “have a direct influence on how the program runs”. They are the closest thing this control has to the single-block and optional-stop keys on a conventional machine, and they are set before you start, not toggled during the run.

Two optional packages sit in the same dialogue. Multiple execution mills many components from one start — either in a matrix (offsets and counts in X and Y, with the required blank size calculated for you) or across a list of saved work piece origins — with a tool-change optimisation that mills every part with the inserted tool before changing. Fits overrides the corrective- and control-measurement intervals and the chip-cleaning mode used when milling to a fit; the manual-cleaning option deliberately pauses the program and releases the door so you can clean the geometry by hand before measurement continues.

Separately, a program execution planner can schedule a program of any type to run at a specific time every day. The machine has to be ready for operation at that time, and an information dialogue reminds the operator two minutes before it fires.

Pausing, Aborting, and Getting Back In

Pausing. Press the ON button while the program is running. A message appears and you acknowledge it one of four ways: Release door (the door is released), Continue (the program carries on), Abort (the program is aborted), or Hide (the message is hidden but the state is unchanged). If the feed was at zero when you pressed, the spindle keeps running through the interruption and it is Release door that stops it.

Aborting. After an abort of the milling program, or after the emergency stop button is pressed, an abort message appears with an explanation of the cause and the ON button changes appearance again. The documented recovery is a fixed sequence — and the order matters, because the acknowledgement is the last step, not the first:

1  Press Release door
2  Check the work piece, the tool, the clamping, the milling program
3  Correct the cause of the fault
4  Close the door
5  Unlock the emergency stop button if it was pressed
6  Press Activate, then the ON button, to acknowledge the abort message
=> the ON button becomes Start program and the job can continue

Where the job resumes from is not decided at this moment — it is decided by the Restart after abort setting in the execution options, above. Choose it before you press start. Once chosen, press the ON button; the restart is prepared, then you touch OK to restart the milling process. On large milling programs that preparation can take several minutes, and the dialogue lets you decide whether the program should start automatically once it is ready.

Getting the machine out of the way. The Park button on the toolbar traverses the machine to the park position at positioning feed; a message then asks whether it should return to the previous position or stay parked. DATRON’s guidance is to configure a park position with a short, safe traverse for tool changing, and to re-check that the park position can still be approached safely after an order change with new table attachments.

Finally, the control will sometimes ask for a reference run before it will do anything useful. That is a function in the Manual operation menu under Service; follow the on-screen instructions.

Messages and Warnings You Will Meet

DATRON next does not publish a numbered fault table for operators. What it does publish is a list of named dialogues that interrupt a run — and, revealingly, the settings screen where each of them can be switched off. That list is the most concrete inventory of run-time interruptions the manual offers, so it is worth reading as a catalogue of what can stop your job.

Read that table twice, because it cuts both ways. Every one of those dialogues can be turned off in the operator-feedback settings so that a proven lights-out process is not interrupted — which means a machine that should have warned you and did not may simply have had the warning disabled by whoever set the job up. If a Datron surprises you by running an unmeasured tool or holding a part on an unactivated vacuum field, check the operator-feedback screen before you blame the control.

Beyond that list, the run-stopping conditions the manual names explicitly are: spindle overload (the machine stops and an error message is shown), vacuum monitoring, which is an option that pauses the program if table vacuum drops, and the abort message itself, which carries its own explanation of cause. Machines can also be given entirely customer-specific error messages tied to inputs, with a defined behaviour — and DATRON documents the precedence: a cancellation outranks a pause, and a pause outranks a notification. So a message you have never seen and cannot find in any manual may be one your integrator wrote.

Habits That Prevent Most of This

Let the wizard finish. The whole design premise is that verification happens before the run, not during it — tool check, then setup, then simulation, then start. Operators who hunt for the equivalent of an MDI line and start jobs out of order lose the one advantage the control was built to give them.

Decide the restart point before you press start, not after. Restart after abort lives in the execution options, and the resume you get is whatever was selected there. Setting it while the part is still clamped and the fault is still fresh is a lot easier than reasoning about it afterwards.

Name your origins and photograph the clamping. The work piece administration takes a name and a picture for a reason. On a machine designed for fast setup turnover, a saved origin with a photo of the fixture is the difference between a five-minute changeover and a re-probe.

Watch spindle load, not the clock. The Status screen puts actual feed against target feed and spindle load side by side. On a high-speed spindle taking light fast passes, load is the earliest signal that a tool is dulling — well before the finish tells you.

Audit the operator-feedback settings on a machine you did not set up. Six named safety dialogues can be silenced there. Knowing which ones are off is part of knowing what the machine will and will not tell you.

Back up, and keep your files out of Samples. DATRON recommends backup copies at least monthly and disclaims liability for missing backups; and resetting the Samples folder to factory settings deletes everything you put there. Keep your own programs and your modified G-code wrapper in the Machine folder or on the network.

See Also

• DATRON next Control Guide — what the control is, the full measuring-cycle catalogue, tool management and storage locations, and an honest what-changes guide for shops arriving from Fanuc or Haas iron.
• DATRON SimPL Programming — the language every loaded program is written in, including OptionalBreak and the measuring commands behind the setup screens.
• DATRON Automation & REST API — starting and pausing programs from outside the machine, DATRON Live, and automation I/O.
• High-Speed Machining — why the spindle-load reading on the Status screen behaves the way it does.
• Heidenhain: Running a Program at the Control and Brother Speedio: Running a Program at the Control — the same operator task on mode-selector controls, for contrast.

References

• DATRON AG, DATRON next — Software Manual 3.4 (English), Mühltal, © 2024 — the original software manual, describing the software from version 3.4, with its target group stated on the title page as “Owner/operator, machine operator”. Chapter 1 (switching on and off, procedure after abort, control and display elements, ON button, status bar, main menu, execution options, toolbar, create workflow for component), Chapter 2 (CAM wizard), Chapter 3 (program administration), Chapter 4 (tool management), Chapter 5 (setting up work piece, origin), Chapter 6 (3D), Chapter 7 (status), Chapter 9.4 (service: reference run, spindle warm-up), Chapter 10.2 (user settings: default values for program execution, operator feedback, program execution planner, customer-specific error messages).
• Section 1.1 of the same manual adds that the instructions are written for “trained, instructed and expert personnel”, and that the original operating instructions are published in German — every other language is a translation. Where wording is quoted in this article it follows the English edition. DATRON next has no numbered fault-code list, so no error-number reference exists to cite.