Heidenhain adds touch technology to TNC 640 mill-turn control

August 13, 2018 – Heidenhain, a manufacturer of controls for machine tools, has announced that its popular TNC 640 high-performance mill-turn control, will now only be available with touch technology.

The technology allows the user to operate the control screen with gestures, similar to smartphones or tablets.

With the new TNC 640 touch screen, the operator can use kinetic scrolling to navigate through long lists, programs, tables and other content. The kinetic scroll converts the impulse of hand contact into a particular scrolling speed. A short, slow swipe scrolls the screen over a few lines, while a long, fast swipe scrolls it over many lines.

The user can stop dynamic scrolling at any time with a short tap. That makes it possible to easily find an NC block, for example, or a tool in long NC programs or tool tables. The user moves the programming and 3-D test graphics directly on the screen, and use touch gestures to zoom in for details, as well as to move or rotate graphics.

The minimum requirement for NC Software version is 340 59x-07 SP2. The hardware enabling touch control are the MC8532 main computer and the BF 860 color flat-panel.

These units come without any hardware keys, as they have been designed for touch operation. The MC 8532 features a 19” touchscreen, an Intel Core i7-7-3 processor with 1.7 GHz on SSDR and 4GB RAM memory. The BF 860 offers four USB ports. The TE 745 (FS) remains unchanged and does not to be upgraded with the hardware. In that way, the operation of the TNC 640 remains familiar to existing TNC 640 users.