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Attempt at LinuxCNC (formerly EMC)
vtsteam:
Those port problems aren't present for me on this Thinkpad because it is currently driving machines under TurboCNC with no problems.
The other problems I've seen mentioned are due to interrupts, and shared video memory. We'll see.
Current progress:
I burned a liveCD R/W of the 8.04 Ubuntu/EMC2.5 version and booted it in the Thinkpad. MAN that was slow loading!!!! I'm used to puppy linux again, whose liveCD loads rather quickly -- natch since the whole OS and apps takes up only 100 megs of a CD, and it loads the system easily entirely into RAM for even a 128 meg equipped oldie. No more CD accesses after loading, so runs like a flash.
Not so Ubuntu -- constant CD accesses while running programs. Yuck. I mean it must have taken 15 minutes to load off disk! and then ran like a hog.
BUT.................When I did the latency tests I got very good figures!!! And when I ran the EMC program I ran ! So I have hope at this point, that if install to the HD the OS loading will be tolerable, and the CNC program itself might actually work. Fingers crossed.
Next step is installing without clobbering my Win98SE installation (w/TurboCNC and a bunch of legacy stuff I don't want to lose) or clobbering a pre-existing Puppy linux installation.
In fact on this same computer there is actually an old Ubuntu (ver 7.4?) installation as well. That one can go bye bye. Should be interesting. Ubuntu's install script, as I remember it likes to erase whole partitions without much explanation or less drastic options.
vtsteam:
As I thought, there were some problems installing Ubuntu over pre-existing OS's on this computer, but nothing that didn't work out in the end.
The main problem at first turned out to be a loose memory stick -- I was only showing 128k, and that turned out to be insufficient for the installer -- it hung about half way through the wizard questions. Cleaning contacts and re-seating memory worked. I guess I've been running Turbocnc with 128K -- which is no problem for that DOS based program.
With about 290K free now the installer didn't halt, but it definitely wanted to partition the drive, and format it, too. Nuhnuhnnuno! It reallyt doesn't have an option to bypass the partitioning and formatting questions, so I took a chance and specified the same partition size as already existed, with the same name, and same ext3 format, and checked a box not to re-format it. The wizaard then asked me if I was sure I didn't want to re-format, warning that conflicting system files would be erased -- which was fine with me. I did want to get rid of the old 7.10 Ubuntu system just not my data -- which I had wisely kept in a different partition.
The installer then proceeded to check for existing operating systems, and actually asked me if I wanted to keep my old personal settings -- that was nice, so i said yes to that. Finally I was greeted with:
vtsteam:
After about a half hour install, I was told to reboot, and popped the CD out of the drive.
Rebooting produced a reasonably responsive system -- boot to password screen was 60 seconds, and after entering username and password I was in the Ubuntu 8.04 desktop in another minute.
I checked and all my pre-existing partitions operating systems (other then Ubuntu 7.10) and data were intact. One slight hitch -- Grub (the startup module which allows you to boot into alternative OS's) had been re-written to only point to the new OS. However, I had anticipated this by saving a copy of the old Grub on another partition. I just have to restore the entries to a file called menu.lst, and we should be good to go multibooting to the various other OS's. I'll be able to boot to Win 98, MSDOS, and two pre-existing versions of puppy linux on this 1998 computer!
Clicking on the Program menu showed a CNC category with entries for a full user manual, a latency test program, the CNC program itself and a G-code reference guide, as well as a getting started document. Of course I went straight to the CNC program, and it opened quickly. I loaded a test G-Code part program (the one I had failed to get TurboCNC to maintain feed rate on) and it popped up in the perspective simulation window:
I used a CNC machine configuration profile for a simulated mill, which actually just pipes the parallel port output to the speaker, so you can hear the stepper pulses for the various axes -- kinda cool creepy music while you watch the animation of the cut. It seemed to work well. The next step will be inputting the actual hard configuration parameters of my actual machine and controllers and testing it out for real.
Joules:
I've been a LinuxCNC/EMC2 user for about 5yrs.... NOTE, I am a user not a programmer. I set it up for my cnc router, had loads of problems till I got the printer port card sorted and working on PCIe. It runs on a dedicated PC box, nothing fancy and I feed it with output from CamBam. The design work is in Rhino and output to CamBam as DXF. Never had a problem with the software, its always done what I needed. As before, I'm not a power user, it does what I need for business.
Joules
vtsteam:
Excellent Joules! Mine is a gantry style, too -- quite similar.
I've got it moving axes now, but am having problems understanding and adjusting it's "home" position. It seems you have to set this outside of the running program in another program called stepconf.
There doesn't seem to be a button to set a current position as the home position in the running CNC program itself -- but maybe I am missing something (probably!)
And even in the stepconf program when I set the home to where I think it should be -- just a little inside the limit switches, near 0,0,0 it seems to end up somewhere else.
Example:
I set home to .010 on the X axis in stepconf, but when I hit "Home" the X axis starts moving to the right and only stops when I hit the halt button.
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