[Emc-users] Conversion Suggesions?

[Jeshua Lacock]

Greetings,

I am the proud new owner of an Bolton Tools AT750 combination lathe and mill 
see here:

 

I am super impressed with the machine so far.

I am open to any suggestions for converting the machine to full LinuxCNC.

I was thinking for budget and simplicity to go with steppers with perhaps Pico 
System's Universal Stepper Controller.

How much torque is recommend? To control the spindles, should I get VFCs? Any 
recommended to work well with LinuxCNC?

I think I will gear down the steppers at least 2:1 if not more. Recommendations 
would be great here too!


Thanks a Zillion!



Cheers,

Jeshua Lacock
Founder/Engineer
3DTOPO Incorporated

Phone: 208.462.4171


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Re: [Emc-users] LinuxCNC on Ubuntu Precise 12.04 with RTAI

[Dave Cole]

I just installed the master-rt version on an Intel D525MW board based 
system.

I had the same problem as some of the other folks; the grub RTAI kernel 
entry was on the second page under "old kernels" or something similar.

I have wrestled with Grub before and lost, so I loaded a software 
package to tweak grub.
http://www.unixmen.com/install-grub-customizer-4-0-4-ubuntu-linux-mint-pear-os-elementary-os/

That let me reorder the entries in the configuration and also add 
isolcpus=1 to the end of the kernel load line..
Highly recommended to avoid heart burn with grub.

I also had to remember to turn hyperthreading off in the bios..

I had this board plugged into a HD screen but the graphics would not 
display in hi-res and after poking around for a bit I realized that 
Ubuntu thought I had two screens and that the computer was a laptop.   
(I found this was a common problem with Ubuntu 11.x and this board 
also..)  So I disabled the second mystery screen and turned off the 
laptop switch.  Still the screen driver was causing big time latency 
problems.   Close a window and the latency numbers went to ridiculous 
levels.

I found a bash shell script on an Intel website to load the drivers that 
support graphics and Ubuntu 12.04 (which they now consider to be 
obsolete for some reason..)   I ran the script, rebooted and the that 
allowed me to run the screen in full 1920x1080, which is really not 
required, but that way I knew the driver was working ok.

With Glxgears running in several different instances the latency numbers 
are as good as they were with 10.04, perhaps even better.
What does seem to be a problem is running a browser via an ethernet 
connection to the web.   That jacks up the latency numbers somewhat.  
But this machine will not be used to browse the web while running the 
machine so not an issue for me.

The D525MW board does have the RealTek 8111E Ethernet chipset that is 
reported to cause problems.Perhaps the latency suffers due to the 
erratic behavior of the 8111??   I don't know.I could not notice any 
Ethernet issues when surfing the web.

I didn't make any attempt to load the VESA video drivers as the Intel 
one seems to be working fine.

So it looks like this is a good solution for running LinuxCNC on Ubuntu 
12.04...  :-)

I also did an apt-get install hostmot2-firmware-all  and that went nicely.

Nice work!  :-)

Next, I have a Gigabyte E350N board that I am going to try running 12.04 
on as the Intel D525MW boards are beginning to get scarce.

Dave

On 1/10/2014 2:37 PM, JohnBannister wrote:
> You may be interested in the mistake I made in installing LinuxCNC on
> Precise. I downloaded the iso from
> http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop and chose the 32 bit version.
> When I installed it on a spare desktop (a old Celeron unknown computer)
> I found I had installed Lubuntu.  I then installed the RTAI kernal as
> per the instructions and all works fine except I get a message when I
> try to install updates  saying "untrusted source" and the update closes,
> and the Grub order problem.
> Pavel Shramov has updated the camview-emc repository to include Precise
> . When adding the repository to the source list I noticed the only other
> precise entry was for linuxCNC I then checked my version and found it
> was 12.10 Quantel. My machine seems to work fine.
> Regards John
>
>
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> Critical Workloads, Development Environments & Everything In Between.
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