When I worked with CNC machines, one of the most interesting, pretty scary and surprising errors came from a dying CMOS battery. Having only ever dealt with suc

When I worked with CNC machines, one of the most interesting, pretty scary and surprising errors came from a dying CMOS battery. Having only ever dealt with such things in video game carts before, I was unpleasantly surprised when I learned the machines used battery powered RAM to store every single one of their internal settings, as in, if the battery died, it went back to even worse than factory default with literally no way to fix this once the battery died other than to have someone.from Minnesota come and recalibrate the entire machine. We had about a week according to the error. We made a frantic search with various local suppliers, managed to secure a compatible battery, then I had to go on a hunt for the battery deep inside the console of the machine. Once I popped the battery out, I had two minutes to get the new one in before shit went FUBAR. It was a bit stressful. Apparently the batteries had about a 7-8 year lifespan, the machine was about 8 years old. Nowhere in the maintenance manuals was it mentioned this may be a problem some day. The only info about this was an obscure error code. Even the machine manufacturer technical support didn't know what was going on until they brought in one of the more experienced techs to talk to me.