Chad Robinson wrote:

I need to get my NC mill working so I can make 3D molds. I am thinking of
hiring a C programer to get it up and running with this stuff.

http://www.servotogo.com/

http://www.linuxcnc.org/

Paul, I'd do it for free if your needs didn't run much more than 30-40 hours
of time. What do you need done?

Regards,
Chad

Thanks Chad.
I am not sure. I'll have to gather a lot more information.

This motion card seems to be the hot tip as it is one of the cheapest
at about $900. I need to buy it and wire it up to the mill before
we can test some of the Linux software. I think this is the motion card most of
the free Linux stuff is written for.

Here is a site that has a lot of Linux NC mill software.
Perhaps you can look it over and make some recommendations.
http://www.linuxcnc.org/handbook/intro/whatisemc2.html

One can also down load it as a pdf file along with a lot of other
pdf info on this free CNC software project.

OK, I'm doing that and looking it over, but it looks like it's fairly well put
together to begin with. As you said, the devil is in the details and only when
you actually have things on hand will we be able to make better judgments
about what needs to be done. I assume the specific card you're interested in
is the Model II.

Basically the complete setup would be what's described in the "simplified"
PC-EMC diagram on the last link you sent. It looks like most or all of the
pieces are there, and any special work would be integration efforts. The last
modification to the EMC code base was 02/22/04 to release version 1.0.0. I
looked at the code base and there's a lot to it but it looks like they've done
their best to make this easy. Did you get over to this link in your browsing?

http://www.linuxcnc.org/bdi/

 From the FAQ:

Q. What is the BDI

A. The Brain Dead Install was originally conceived as a basic Red Hat 6 based
distro with realtime kernel and EMC packages precompiled. Thus taking all the
pain and drudgery out of patching and compiling a whole bunch of source code.

There are downloadable ISO images at this site. They say it'll run on pretty
old hardware, but if you use the newer code bases (and you might have to if
you want these drivers) their recommendations go "all the way up to" a Celeron
633, 4Gb drive, 128Mb RAM. It's getting tougher to find those boxes with ISA
cards, though. What do you have available?

Anyway, happy to help if you need a hand. But would you please change my
e-mail address on the list to crj@lucubration.com? =)

Regards,
Chad

Thanks Chad. I just did not have time to read it all. I think the main
problem will be writing the M code software to interface to the automatic tool
changer that I have on my mill. After this we will take the thread off line as
I think most people are not interested. I'll order the card in a day
or so and start installing as time allows. Here is a picture of my Kasuga.
I'll need to scan in the auto tool changer interface info and
email it to you. I'll also take some more pictures of the mill today.

Paul Lamar
 
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