Professional 6 Control

Makino introduces the fully equipped Professional 6 (Pro6) control designed to move operators fluidly through machine set up, empower them with easily accessible information and protect them with enhanced safety. The Pro6 accelerates productivity for machine shops and tool, die and mold makers with streamlined screen layouts, operator guidance and latest machine functions.

“The new Professional 6 control gets you from parts to profits faster with enhanced functionality by making the point where the operator meets the machine, a seamless transition,” said Jim Brown, systems and control engineering manager at Makino. “Cycle-time savings and dynamic-control capabilities have been added to the new control’s Geometric Intelligence functions to help lower costs per part.”

Familiar functionality has been maintained from the previous Pro5 control while simplifying the human-machine interface (HMI) with an advanced touch-screen layout. Screen customization, code and parameter search, guidance functions and other machine information are now available at the operator’s fingertips.

With a perfect blend of the proven stability of FANUC hardware and Microsoft Windows Embedded Standard 7 OS, the cutting-edge Pro6 provides:

• Streamlined operation — The screen layout matches the operator’s process flow from setup to production.
• Operator assistance – Guidance functions, parameters, code and manual search function are available on screen when and where they’re needed.
• Additional standard functionality is now available to make sure operators are ready for any job.
• Enhanced safety – A dual door check, 3-D graphic viewer, maintenance screens and easy access to machine information are included.

Pro6 is an advanced set of control technology engineered to remove time and energy in production. Makino reduced the number of hard buttons, replacing them with touch-screen commands that resemble controls on an Internet Web browser. The recently developed “My Panel” features enable operators to store frequently used functions, macros or switches for quick access.

The Pro6 control has a new QWERTY keyboard and larger 15-inch display. Also added is an interactive status bar at the top of the screen. By touching a warning, alarm or indicator status icon, the user is taken directly to the related screen displaying information about the issue.

Like its predecessor, the Pro5, Makino’s Pro6 control is customizable. Added to the Pro6 is on-screen programming guidance for drilling canned cycles, probing, automatic tool length measurement (ATLM) and tilted working plane. The operator follows prompts and selects “input” to automatically insert lines of code into a program.

Pro6 has a converter to find parameter numbers based on the Pro5 number and automatically converts measurements from inches to millimeters.

New functions raise the standard for machine control, including its Geometric Intelligence (GI) that provides 2-D corner control and optimized canned cycle indexing. Pro6 also has simultaneous program editing, MDI recall of the past 20 inputs and 3 GB of memory for program and subprogram storage, with an option to expand to 20 GB.

The new Pro 6 control is currently only available on select models.