Connecting Vpanel PCs to Roland Mills... from across the lab

[tuyere]

Hey all,
We have 7 Roland mills, governed by 3 PCs running VPanel instances distributed appropriately. We don't stream jobs directly to the mill from Millbox, we do job setup on a dedicated CAM pc and transfer the job files to a networked folder and run them on each controlling PC.
We've recently reorganized the lab and have had to centralize the Vpanel PCs into a single workstation, with the PCs located a ways away from the mills- far enough away that we'll probably need active/powered USB cables for some of them.

How practical is it to try controlling a mill from a workstation, say, 30 feet away? My understanding is that in this situation it'd normally be best to avoid USB entirely and use adapters to run a cable more suited to long runs, like cat6, but I don't know how picky the mill will be about using something other than a short USB patch cable.
My options right now look like: 1) an extra-long shielded + active USB cable, or 2) USB:network cable adapters with a long run of cat6. Am I missing anything?

 

[Contraluz]

Hey all,
We have 7 Roland mills, governed by 3 PCs running VPanel instances distributed appropriately. We don't stream jobs directly to the mill from Millbox, we do job setup on a dedicated CAM pc and transfer the job files to a networked folder and run them on each controlling PC.
We've recently reorganized the lab and have had to centralize the Vpanel PCs into a single workstation, with the PCs located a ways away from the mills- far enough away that we'll probably need active/powered USB cables for some of them.

How practical is it to try controlling a mill from a workstation, say, 30 feet away? My understanding is that in this situation it'd normally be best to avoid USB entirely and use adapters to run a cable more suited to long runs, like cat6, but I don't know how picky the mill will be about using something other than a short USB patch cable.
My options right now look like: 1) an extra-long shielded + active USB cable, or 2) USB:network cable adapters with a long run of cat6. Am I missing anything?

For what it's worth, I have this USB cable:



connecting the Roland mill with the nesting PC and it works well! Granted, it is just one mill and one PC...

I use Dropbox to move the STL files from my design PC to the nesting PC.

 

[sidesh0wb0b]

we have a 20ft cable connected with no issues. ran up into the ceiling and back down to where the mill is. longer than we need but 10' wouldn't be enough haha. there arent any delays when sending jobs, no issues that we have had at all. electric shoots 30ft pretty fast

 

[AaronW12321]

I ran a 25+ foot usb cable to them for years. I think it may have been powered. Never had any issues personally