Old school DRO vs modern tablet readout, my Haas crashed last week

Last week my digital readout froze mid-cut on a 3 inch aluminum plate and the spindle plowed right into the work, cost me 4 hours and a ruined fixture. Three years ago I ran the same job on a 1980s Bridgeport with a glass scale DRO and never had a hiccup. Is the touchscreen convenience worth trusting your feeds and speeds to a device that can reboot, or am I just unlucky with cheap electronics?

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1 Comment

river_bailey21mo ago

Honestly, I gotta push back on this. You blame the tablet readout, but that glass scale DRO from the 80s was dead simple, of course it never failed. Your crash probably wasnt the electronics, it was you trusting a fancy touchscreen to babysit a cut it has zero control over. The tablet is just a display, man, it doesnt drive the spindle. If your feeds and speeds were set right and your fixturing was solid, a frozen screen is annoying, sure, but it shouldnt cause a crash unless you were watching the numbers instead of the cut. Tbh, sounds like you got complacent with the modern gear and the old machine forced you to pay attention. Unlucky electronics? Maybe, but the real fix is running the job like the tool is gonna die mid-cut, not blaming the tool when it does.