Windows Has Long Filenames But Your CNC Control Has DOS Filenames

This is one of those seemingly little things that wastes too much time. Windows allows nice long file names, yay! But your CNC Controller is not the newest kid on the block and it still uses the old school DOS “83″ (for 8 letters to the left of the period and 3 to the right) filenames. The good news is a lot of controllers will display your first comment (the one after “%”) to try to help you understand what’s in the file, but you’re still left wondering sometimes what the filename will turn out to be when your file is loaded on the controller.

I was talking recently to one machinist who was taking digital photos of his controller’s file list just so he could refer to it without walking back to his machine.

I can’t fix your controller to show long file names, but I can at least make it easy to see what the short file name will be while you’re still in G-Wizard Editor. We put the file name right up on the window title bar like a lot of editors, and when the next release comes out, you’ll see the short file name up there too. It will look something like this:

The short file names is in square brackets to the right of the long one (underlined in red)…

Note that the last digit of the name (the “1″ following the “~” in the screen shot) may not be the same on your machine–it’s a function of the order files are saved and any similar names already there. Since GWE can’t see what’s on your machine (yet?), we can’t do much better than this.

If you have a suggestion to help save a machinist some time, drop us a note.

No related posts.