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>That 'gps-lockdown' is to make sure the machine doesn't get moved around just for the heck of it taking it out of spec and then having the manufacturer turn up after a bunch of complaining.

Nonsense. If they move it, then that spoils the calibration, sure, but rendering it inoperable is stupid. Also why would the mfr complain about having to recalibrate the machine, they get paid for that if you're the one that ruined it. You also seem to assume that machinists are mere button pushers following instructions. A good experienced machinist knows more about his/her machine's capabilities/precision than anyone ITT. Hell, for the machine we're talking about, the machinist may well be an ME and if not, then probably one won't be far from it.

>Ostensibly another reason is that some guy in Iran could set up a shop in the US as a front, buy a bunch of these machines and then ship them to evade an embargo so that's why they are locked to location.

Also nonsense. Let's not pretend that Iranians (as in Iranian physicists) are too stupid to defeat such a scheme.

>The calibration gear costs a multiple of what the machine itself costs, usually works on the laser-interferometry principle

No way. This is all just hand-waviness and big-words. Laser interferometry systems have gotten much cheaper, more portable; and purpose built instruments are available for all manner of trades.

Here, a maintenance mechanic job posting that requires knowledge of "laser interferometer system" http://jobview.monster.com/Maintenance-Mechanic-offre-emploi...

Now either that is a very special maintenance mechanic, or laser-interferometry is more common than you thought.

> but rendering it inoperable is stupid.

No, it's prudent.

Having to toss a few hundred K worth of product is stupid.

> Also why would the mfr complain about having to recalibrate the machine, they get paid for that if you're the one that ruined it.

Because once there is a pile of money on the line people tend to forget that they moved the machine.

> You also seem to assume that machinists are mere button pushers following instructions.

No, but calibrating a machine after installation is a job that requires different tools and skills than operating a machine.

> A good experienced machinist knows more about his/her machine's capabilities/precision than anyone ITT.

More than the designers in some cases. But that's the exception, not the rule. Typical machine operators are definitely not in the same class as the technicians that install the machinery and calibrate it. Though over the years some of them can become experts on their machine over and beyond what anybody else knows about it, and they can gain the ability to coax workpieces from them with accuracy beyond what the machines are spec'd to.

> Hell, for the machine we're talking about, the machinist may well be an ME and if not, then probably one won't be far from it.

That still doesn't mean he/she has the expert view on what goes on inside it. In my experience machinists tend to be experts on materials, tooling, cooling, clamping, feeds & speeds, QA, packaging and sometimes alloys.

They tend to be less knowledgeable about electronics, motorized drives, software, environmental factors.

>>Ostensibly another reason is that some guy in Iran could set up a shop in the US as a front, buy a bunch of these machines and then ship them to evade an embargo so that's why they are locked to location.

> Also nonsense. Let's not pretend that Iranians (as in Iranian physicists) are too stupid to defeat such a scheme.

Let me cite a representative of a manufacturer:

" Sorry you've not had a stellar service experience. PM me with your info, names, etc. and I'll make sure you get better support.

Regarding the device, Weapons of Mass Destruction. Worst case for a negligent violation would be Dr. Mori himself spending time in the slammer. That along is enough motivation for DMG MORI to follow the regulation very carefully. Other reasons include all of those stated above!

btw, no need to waste time on bypassing it. It is pretty solid. We have to make it so Iran, N. Korea, etc's best can't bypass it. "

http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/dmg-mori-gildemeister-m...

> No way. This is all just hand-waviness and big-words. Laser interferometry systems have gotten much cheaper, more portable; and purpose built instruments are available for all manner of trades.

Yes, amazingly miniaturization and such work even for expensive gear. That doesn't mean it's suddenly much less expensive though it is definitely a bit cheaper than in the past when the technology was brand new.

Just the setup is a couple of days (to reach thermal equilibrium), a basic system is a few tens of thousands of dollars, a system capable of simultaneous alignment of a 5 axis machining center to within a fraction of a thou will be a tad more than that. Operators of that gear aren't free either.

> Now either that is a very special maintenance mechanic, or laser-interferometry is more common than you thought.

Or maybe there are multiple classes of such instruments for various applications and ranges of precision?

Note how that job posting is for a maintenance mechanic and not for a machinist?

>No, it's prudent.

Trigger the "tilt sensor" require a supervisory override. Call it uncalibrated operation. Now it's on the machine owner. Not your problem anymore.

>Because once there is a pile of money on the line people tend to forget that they moved the machine.

Fine, detect movement if you don't trust the owners (you shouldn't), stick it to the floor with a serial numbered bolt, whatever. Disabling the machine is a step too far.

>They tend to be less knowledgeable about electronics

Which makes them easy marks doesn't it?

>btw, no need to waste time on bypassing it. It is pretty solid. We have to make it so Iran, N. Korea, etc's best can't bypass it. "

/u/MoriGuy is a fool. Iran in particular has some very good schools, and no doubt could defeat this scheme in any number of ways. This is only hurting non-Iranian customers.

>miniaturization and such work even for expensive gear. That doesn't mean it's suddenly much less expensive though

Actually, it does. You may not be able to by them at Home Depot yet, but you can find them in tradesmen's tool kits, and in all manner of other uses that wouldn't be possible without relatively inexpensive equipment.

>Note how that job posting is for a maintenance mechanic and not for a machinist?

Pick ones that you like then. It was third in the list of results for me. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Laser+interferometry+millwright&t=...

> /u/MoriGuy is a fool. Iran in particular has some very good schools, and no doubt could defeat this scheme in any number of ways. This is only hurting non-Iranian customers.

Tell that to US politicians.

If the US demands that its trading partners make such machinery tamper proof you really can't go and blame the manufacturers for actually complying with those regulations and doing a reasonably good job of it. Whether or not it has the intended effect is not actually their problem.

Agreed that disabling the machine is in some cases a step too far but having witnessed just how ugly these disputes tend to get in some cases it is actually a benefit because it puts a limit on the damage done.

You're arguing for a 'warranty void' kind of sticker. But that would not take care of the worries of the lease companies (who are probably the biggest beneficiaries of this kind of lock-out mechanism).

>Tell that to US politicians.

Ugh. I think we can both agree that there are some problems here. I wish I knew how to go about solving them.

>Whether or not it has the intended effect is not actually their problem.

How far they go abusing their advantage, is.

>You're arguing for a 'warranty void' kind of sticker.

Not 'warranty void' pre se, but a 'we don't guarantee performance beyond some threshold without a factory certified calibration.'

>But that would not take care of the worries of the lease companies (who are probably the biggest beneficiaries of this kind of lock-out mechanism).

What a self-defeating tactic! Customer didn't make their lease payment; better make sure they can't make the next one either!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incide...

Iranians already know how to spoof gps.

>That 'gps-lockdown' is to make sure the machine doesn't get moved around just for the heck of it taking it out of spec and then having the manufacturer turn up after a bunch of complaining.

I thought the same thing when reading this article: maybe the tractor manufactures don't want farmers fiddling with the timing because there's no reason to be fiddling with the timing. Perhaps the desire to do so is force of habit on the farmer's part, the product of dealing with old equipment for many years, combined with a little bit of "I know better" hubris.

That said, if you're willing to waive your warranty, everything should be fair game,

I was chatting with an operator of a Cat excavator who was building retaining walls with large rocks. His machine is chipped to produce more HP, the hydraulic pump is tweaked to allow a higher pressure, hoses and seals are upgraded as they fail.

According to Cat there is no reason for him to do this, it will only cause seals, hoses, etc to wear out faster.

According to him, the owner of the machine who has to live with it each day there is a reason - because he wants to and it is his machine. He knows the downsides, but he also knows he can lift larger rocks higher and faster than he can with a stock machine - so it is worth it to him.

If the owner of a machine wants to ruin it or improve it, I think that is their right to do so - at the risk of the warranty.

On a different note - I can easily change the fuel filter on my car. The problem is I don't have the software to tell it that I've done so and to prime the fuel system before starting. I'm left in the same boat, gray market cables to talk to the car or pay through the nose for the dealer to push a few buttons. I've had thoughts of ditching "modern" cars for an awesome restored classic that can be worked on. The price is about the same.

That's not just a warranty issue, that's also dangerous.

He simply needs a larger machine.

I normally agree with you but I can imagine situations where a small pimped out machine is better than a bigger one. Especially in suburban areas, you might not be able to get the big machine to the back yard for example.

Other than that, I'm in the bigger is better camp :)

Nicely said. Otherwise this leads to TAAS quickly (Tractor as a service) and monthly payment just for being able to use it. Or Tesla as a service - where you not only buy a vehicle but also a recurring profit to the manufacturer and a long list of things you have to do or are not allowed to do. Oops, we're already there.

I was friends (past tense because he died of a heart attack) with a guy who operated an excavator (~12,000 pound Kubota KX161-3S) up in the Santa Cruz mountains. We've got some pretty steep terrain here. He has walked that excavator into places you simply would not believe it could go.

I bought that excavator from him and the company replaced it with a newer model with more "safety" features. According to him if you got on too steep of a slope it shut itself off. Super, super dangerous.

Yeah, I get it, he was pushing past the point where he was completely safe. His choice and he could do things with that machine, amazing things. I'm not a fan of the direction heavy equipment is going.

They have been doing precision equipment long before the DRM era.

This is a particular case of abuse from the manufacturer. I can think of several ways to let the shop owner have his way without playing the "mis-calibration" song. Besides, any set-up procedure can be used again to calibrate the device.

Edit: After reading their brochure, I am now convinced this is a case of DRM overreaching; the machine is in no way that sensitive to relocation to warrant a lock-down. Hey, they pride themselves with the machine's strength on page three: "... designed according to principles of finite element method", with a picture showing the machine stresses.

Yes, I know. And since long before then there have been endless back-and-forths between manufacturers of such equipment and their customers about achievable precision.

Especially after initial delivery and after initial calibration. And of course nobody would ever move such a machine and forget to tell the manufacturer that that's what they did.

The strength of the web is a huge factor in machine precision (and repeatability, just as important) but what you don't get out of that brochure is that just lifting and putting that machine back down again will put it seriously out of spec, the deformation incurred will require a complete recalibration. Dealing with dynamic loading is a different problem entirely.

We're talking about machines where thermal compensation is considered a normal thing and where you compensate for toolwear.

Not all of these machines are owned outright (they can be very expensive), plenty of them are leased and lease companies just love it when a customer goes out of business and their expensive goods have grown legs and have walked off.

Anyway, DRM without valid reasons is a bad thing, but there are some reasons why not wanting to move machinery like this around without knowing about it is a good thing and you've provided no reason why it isn't, obviously, you can petition the manufacturer to help assist in a move and re-calibration if required (nothing stops you from doing that in the present day), and your conclusion that the machines strength means it does not have to be calibrated is out of touch with reality as far as I'm aware of it.

Those unlock-codes are provided for free to the buyer of the machinery, and it isn't even a given that they will always trigger for every kind of move. (But at a guess, if you simulated shipping one in a container I'm pretty sure that it will come out dead.)

FWIW I worked on the software of an older generation of machinery like this and have spent enough time watching teams calibrate them to have serious respect for how easy it is to knock a machine to 'useless' territory.

As for the bad version of DRM: Mitutoyo had some equipment ending up in Iran contravening the US export ban (pretty weird that a Japanese company could be found in violation of a US export ban, but there are probably relevant details that I'm not aware of), so that's where the DRM component comes in.

So if you really want to complain about that aspect then you should petition the government, not the CNC manufacturers.

But "lock-down, unlock through mfg" has other uses too.

(You could easily imagine that the Gyro software could be set up in such a way that if the change in location was minor that it would not cause a lock-down if the export restriction were the real concern here)

Which makes me wonder how these would fare during earthquakes.

Agree on all points.

For what is worth, the last page of the brochure says black on white in a visible font that device relocation is subject to Japan's export restrictions. They don't care if your machine stops and they are under no obligation to make it work again.

Now, if it is _also_ about precision, then the contract will probably have some fine print about it too...

These machines are usually sold and installed through 'certified dealerships', in other words, people making money on having spent the time to learn how to properly sell and service this stuff prior to and after delivery.

That's a fair investment and I wouldn't put it past them (the dealers) to pull tricks, for instance to charge for supplying an unlock code (which they really should not do, you can always switch to a different dealer if they do though).

The manufacturer however has very little say in what happens to the machines after they leave the factory, though to comply with ITAR I believe the codes are only produced at the source so I guess they theoretically could strongarm someone into paying a fee for equipment they already own.

But any manufacturer that would do this would generate a lot of headwind and word gets around very quickly in the metalworking world. Such a manufacturer would not be selling much longer.

A colleague of mine had a very large and precise (those two a contradictory, so you can guess at the kind of expense involved) machining center installed and it took two months before the workpieces were acceptable.

That machine too had a gyro and it was definitely there with 'dual purpose', on the one hand the ITAR compliance made it mandatory but I'm pretty sure that both parties were happy the gyro was there in one case to prove that it had not been moved and in the other to make sure that it wasn't moved.

There's a lot of money riding on machinery like this, imagine QA at the recipient of a load of parts deciding that they're worthless scrap and then you're arguing with the manufacturer whether or not the machine is at fault or you are at fault because you have shifted the machine. Better if everybody is on the same page in situations like that.

> it took two months before the workpieces were acceptable.

For a new manual Bridgeport knee mill, it may be more than two months before the machinist who runs it is happy with it.

>There's a lot of money riding on machinery like this, imagine QA at the recipient of a load of parts deciding that they're worthless scrap

How is that even possible for a competent/honest machine shop? As if the shop doesn't inspect its output. Is there some sort of CNC-vending-machine business model that I haven't heard of where clients email their CAD files to the machine and next week a freight truck arrives with the stuff?

> How is that even possible for a competent/honest machine shop?

Because measuring things is hard.

> As if the shop doesn't inspect its output.

Of course they do. And even then it can still happen that what passes inspection at the shop (especially in early runs) does not pass muster with the recipient.

Which is why you don't want to be moving your equipment around if you can help it. Depending on the precision required it really doesn't take much to go from 'pass' to 'scrap' and it is not rare at all for the incoming inspection to reject parts that were accepted at the production facility. This is logical because there is money on the line.

> Is there some sort of CNC-vending-machine business model that I haven't heard of where clients email their CAD files to the machine and next week a freight truck arrives with the stuff?

You seen to have missed the internet revolution in machining, but yes that's exactly the model these days.

Only I'd replace 'machine' with 'machine shop' or 'production facility'.

>Because measuring things is hard.

Harder than making things? No, absolutely not.

>And even then it can still happen that what passes inspection at the shop (especially in early runs) does not pass muster with the recipient.

That's a communication problem. Happens often enough, but DRM does nothing to fix it.

>You seen to have missed the internet revolution in machining, but yes that's exactly the model these days.

I know that may be what people want but that's still a fantasy for precision machining. I don't think anyone is near the point that you can fire the machinists and simply hire someone to sweep up the tailings, refill the oil tanks, and slap shipping labels on things, (and then I suppose cash the checks from your mountain chalet).

> Harder than making things? No, absolutely not.

Measuring a shape in 3D with a given accuracy is immensely harder than making a shape in 3D with that same accuracy.

Just one example that might convince you of this:

Take any old lathe, and a micrometer. Run the lathe, cut yourself a nice chunk of hss shaft to 25 mm diameter, precision 1/100th of a mm, cut it off at 25 mm long.

Now try to imagine all the ways in which that object that you just made can be non-cylindrical, in which the planes can be non-parallel and what kind of other deformities such as tip-radius artifacts there might be. If you're going to use your trusty micrometer to measure it you will not be able to detect much if any of that. It will take a very expensive setup to be able to determine within 1/100th of a mm what the exact shape of that thing you made is.

> That's a communication problem. Happens often enough, but DRM does nothing to fix it.

True, but specifically 'machine has not been tampered with' can make such communications problems a lot easier to solve. Having witnessed exactly that scenario here recently I'm fairly convinced that without the gyro to prove the machine had not been tampered with that it would have been a lot longer discussion, possibly even a court case.

This happened post delivery and the machine was for interesting reasons unable to reach the advertised accuracy. It took months to get that one solved and the bill caused by the downtime was substantial.

> I know that may be what people want but that's still a fantasy for precision machining. I don't think anyone is near the point that you can fire the machinists and simply hire someone to sweep up the tailings, refill the oil tanks, and slap shipping labels on things, (and then I suppose cash the checks from your mountain chalet).

Who spoke about firing the machinists?

The thing is that between the design department and the machining center there is a series of well defined steps and then a whole pile of machine specific knowledge to get a part to come out right. But the whole chain is digital now, in the interest of repeatability, including tool management, stand times, deformation correction and so on.

It's not rare at all for client and supplier to be continents away from each other and they're definitely not going to visit each other in order to get some part produced.

This also means the market got a lot more competitive which means that inbound quality control is a very important factor in keeping everybody in the chain reliable.

Unattended operation including auto-feed has been done for years and it's not rare at all to see one operator/machinist run 5 machines.

> The strength of the web is a huge factor in machine precision (and repeatability, just as important)

Precision is repeatability.

> Machines in the sub .0001 precision class are so sensitive to being moved around that it can take weeks of careful calibration to get them to operate within spec.

But now you're talking about something else. You don't need a law to prohibit people from voiding their warranty and ruining their own property, darwinism takes care of that all by itself.

All the law needs to do is say that if you bypass the lockout you lose your warranty. Sending people to prison for it is insane.

Nobody got sent to prison for that.