Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
Bruce, here ist the answer concerning the NC Box 189 from Taiwan. Too much fuss for me to order one from far east, though. I want to have a local distributor to talk with just in case. Peter Blodow -Original Message- From: Anthony_DMP [mailto:anth...@dmp.com.tw] Sent: Monday, October 15, 2012 9:25 AM To: 'Peter Blodow' Subject: RE: NC Box 189 Hi Peter, Thanks for mail, my name is Anthony Lu that charge the NCBox, due this product just available in the market, still looking the distributor in EU area, so currently the process will be order from me (Taiwan) directly, you can feel free to contact me for any assistance, and NCBox is available in stock. Thanks Anthony Gentlemen, I also coudn't find the NC Box 189 on the internet site of the manufacturer or his distributors. I sent them a mail asking for price and availability and got no answer, so far. Peter Blodow Ehrenberg Bruce Layne schrieb: I followed that NCbox-189 thread on the LinuxCNC forum several months ago. Pretty nifty. I followed the link you provided to the manufacturer's site. They don't sell the NCbox-189, so I followed their links to several of their distributors, and they didn't seem to be selling it either. So I'd still list availability as a problem, but that's probably a chicken and egg problem that would go away if there was a commitment from the manufacturer to provide long term hardware availability in exchange for a commitment from LinuxCNC developers to provide long term support. As an end user, if it was $200 or less (it should be!) and it was a true plug and play low-latency solution that didn't require patching kernels, then I'd be a potential customer. -- Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_sfd2d_oct ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
Terry Christophersen wrote: I always surf the net while the CNC programs are running, I see nothing wrong with that. I play music and watch youtube videos also. What is the hourly rate for watching ytube? I need to know so I can tell my customers.This sounds like more fun than running another machine. Just kidding Perfectly reasonable question ... I have a TV out in the workshop ... don't necessarily watch, but it's background noise. But it's another example of kit that does other things such as play web videos and browse the web. I don't need that on the CNC kit :) Yes a dual/quad core motherboard can quite happily run all the CNC stuff on one core and graphics on another. I was battling a problem on Monday with a machine which was behaving as if it was overloaded. It kept freezing. A bit of a pain when it was serving web pages to 50 other users in real time, running announcements and other displays and so on. Not sure what was going on, but there have been network changes over the weekend, and a new 'anti-virus' update and so the question was 'Where IS the fault?'. It had been running fine for years, and after complaints to the IT department, I dropped in on site yesterday only to find the machine running fine again! In the 24 hours since it's done less than 30 minutes of work :) 15 minutes per core. Still no explanation as to what had been changed over night :( Just how much processing power is being wasted world wide? I'd even ask how much more power is wasted running W7 ... the problem machine is still running W2k happily, but I am building an XP powered version with the same motherboard so we can actually compare that. The legacy hardware does not (YET) have a Linux alternative but similarly it will not run on W7 ... Reason for suggesting two computers rather than two cores was simply that running several machines each with it's own CNC processor, 'networked' back to a single control station also makes perfect sense. Yes 'VNC' and the like can access the graphics of each machine direct, but does each machine actually need the graphics? Raspberry Pi could well provide slave processing of a simple machine for a central management station ... it's just a matter of identifying just what each 'package' actually needs to do and building the best solution which might be a specialist 'motion control' co-processor rather than an ITX box? -- Lester Caine - G8HFL - Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
I recently put in a 7i25 card because of latency issues. This make a pretty rock solid system. I don't see the big difference between buffering using a pci card, vs a usb device. Mesa has a high speed usb breakout that would probably work?? I think it uses the high speed ftdi chip? I think perhaps the real reason there isn't much support for this remote controller idea, and not necessarily a bad one, is that people have their hands full, and don't feel like doing it currently. On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 5:14 AM, Lester Caine les...@lsces.co.uk wrote: Terry Christophersen wrote: I always surf the net while the CNC programs are running, I see nothing wrong with that. I play music and watch youtube videos also. What is the hourly rate for watching ytube? I need to know so I can tell my customers.This sounds like more fun than running another machine. Just kidding Perfectly reasonable question ... I have a TV out in the workshop ... don't necessarily watch, but it's background noise. But it's another example of kit that does other things such as play web videos and browse the web. I don't need that on the CNC kit :) Yes a dual/quad core motherboard can quite happily run all the CNC stuff on one core and graphics on another. I was battling a problem on Monday with a machine which was behaving as if it was overloaded. It kept freezing. A bit of a pain when it was serving web pages to 50 other users in real time, running announcements and other displays and so on. Not sure what was going on, but there have been network changes over the weekend, and a new 'anti-virus' update and so the question was 'Where IS the fault?'. It had been running fine for years, and after complaints to the IT department, I dropped in on site yesterday only to find the machine running fine again! In the 24 hours since it's done less than 30 minutes of work :) 15 minutes per core. Still no explanation as to what had been changed over night :( Just how much processing power is being wasted world wide? I'd even ask how much more power is wasted running W7 ... the problem machine is still running W2k happily, but I am building an XP powered version with the same motherboard so we can actually compare that. The legacy hardware does not (YET) have a Linux alternative but similarly it will not run on W7 ... Reason for suggesting two computers rather than two cores was simply that running several machines each with it's own CNC processor, 'networked' back to a single control station also makes perfect sense. Yes 'VNC' and the like can access the graphics of each machine direct, but does each machine actually need the graphics? Raspberry Pi could well provide slave processing of a simple machine for a central management station ... it's just a matter of identifying just what each 'package' actually needs to do and building the best solution which might be a specialist 'motion control' co-processor rather than an ITX box? -- Lester Caine - G8HFL - Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On 10 October 2012 13:38, Erik Friesen e...@aercon.net wrote: I recently put in a 7i25 card because of latency issues. This make a pretty rock solid system. I don't see the big difference between buffering using a pci card, vs a usb device. The Mesa (and Pico) cards don't buffer as such. They are still very much realtime devices. What they do do is produce PWM signals or step rates of a specified value without further interaction from the PC. In this sense they merely emulate the behaviour of the base thread. (no step rate or pwm value changes happen in the base thread on an all-software system either) This relies on them being given an updated set of values very nearly exactly 1mS later. -- atp If you can't fix it, you don't own it. http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On 10/8/2012 10:29 PM, emc-users-requ...@lists.sourceforge.net wrote: have a machine that runs latency tests just fine and then gives me a real-time error when I start LCNC. Never really tracked it down because I always intended just to move on to a new machine. It can be frustrating. I think the era of machines that fail latency peaked when the P4 was new, but I'm not really sure about that. I suspect that Mach also runs better on machines with low latency and the machines that LCNC complains about also don't run Mach as well as they might. It's just that Mach ignores the long intervals, mostly because step/dir machines are somewhat immune to that issue. Eric These issues are why I am so strongly in favor of the dedicated microprocessor for the real time part. It is the norm in all computer systems- look inside that PC and Ill bet there are a dozen separate processors doing things like graphics, network, disk control, etc. PCs are wonderful GUI devices and have great computational ability. They were never designed to be real time systems. Why are some people so hung up on the idea that one box (even a box full of micros) must be used as the machine control? step/dir machines are not immune to timing glitches. My knee mill uses a stepper on the knee for Z. I had a frequent glitch that lost position. I replaced the stepper with a BIG servo and had the same problem. I replaced the parallel port with a smoothstepper and the problem was solved- I put the stepper back and have never had a lost Z step. With low cost motion devices like smoothstepper, pokeys, kflop, centipede, etc it seems clear to me that fighting real time latency issues on PCs are a waste of effort. ron ginger -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
This is how my CNC PC is done. It has a dedicated CPU for CNC real time work and another CPU for everything else, like watching youtube, GUI, etc etc. Never a latency problem that I could detect. i On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 6:52 AM, Ron Ginger rongin...@roadrunner.com wrote: On 10/8/2012 10:29 PM, emc-users-requ...@lists.sourceforge.net wrote: have a machine that runs latency tests just fine and then gives me a real-time error when I start LCNC. Never really tracked it down because I always intended just to move on to a new machine. It can be frustrating. I think the era of machines that fail latency peaked when the P4 was new, but I'm not really sure about that. I suspect that Mach also runs better on machines with low latency and the machines that LCNC complains about also don't run Mach as well as they might. It's just that Mach ignores the long intervals, mostly because step/dir machines are somewhat immune to that issue. Eric These issues are why I am so strongly in favor of the dedicated microprocessor for the real time part. It is the norm in all computer systems- look inside that PC and Ill bet there are a dozen separate processors doing things like graphics, network, disk control, etc. PCs are wonderful GUI devices and have great computational ability. They were never designed to be real time systems. Why are some people so hung up on the idea that one box (even a box full of micros) must be used as the machine control? step/dir machines are not immune to timing glitches. My knee mill uses a stepper on the knee for Z. I had a frequent glitch that lost position. I replaced the stepper with a BIG servo and had the same problem. I replaced the parallel port with a smoothstepper and the problem was solved- I put the stepper back and have never had a lost Z step. With low cost motion devices like smoothstepper, pokeys, kflop, centipede, etc it seems clear to me that fighting real time latency issues on PCs are a waste of effort. ron ginger -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On 10/09/2012 08:58 AM, andy pugh wrote: That is what EMC was conceived as. The whole underlying idea was to use cheap, off the shelf, PC hardware for machine control, rather than use expensive dedicated hardware. Does it need to be an exclusive OR function? Can't we have both? LinuxCNC was initially conceived to directly control machine motion in realtime using a parallel port, and it does a very good job of that, but it now supports a number of commercially available I/O and motion control hardware products such as Mesa, Opto 22, etc. I love being able to pick up a cheap or free PC and use it as a machine controller, but I think it'd also be great if there was a small, low cost commercially available PC that is pretty much guaranteed to work as a LinuxCNC controller. Or maybe a couple of different flavors of supported LinuxCNC controllers. Maybe one could boot from USB for LinuxCNC installation and use flash memory instead of a hard drive for small embedded LinuxCNC applications in dirty high vibration environments. There are definitely advantages to having a known good controller solution. Some people would love to spend $150 online and cross the controller off the To Do list instead of going on a Craig's List scavenger hunt. Others are machine integrators who might build 200 new machines a year and they don't want the hassle of validating a PC for LinuxCNC only to have the PC manufacturer make an unannounced cost reduction that breaks the realtime application. -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
I agree, Bruce. This would be a very nice option to have. I've thought something like this: http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product=TS-7350 could be made to work, but I'm not sure the CPU is fast enough (may not have hardware floating point). Peter should make a single board computer with FPGA and processor tailored for LinuxCNC. It might be hard to get the volumes high enough to keep the price down though. -- Ralph From: Bruce Layne [linux...@thinkingdevices.com] Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2012 6:19 AM To: Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC) Subject: Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux On 10/09/2012 08:58 AM, andy pugh wrote: That is what EMC was conceived as. The whole underlying idea was to use cheap, off the shelf, PC hardware for machine control, rather than use expensive dedicated hardware. Does it need to be an exclusive OR function? Can't we have both? LinuxCNC was initially conceived to directly control machine motion in realtime using a parallel port, and it does a very good job of that, but it now supports a number of commercially available I/O and motion control hardware products such as Mesa, Opto 22, etc. I love being able to pick up a cheap or free PC and use it as a machine controller, but I think it'd also be great if there was a small, low cost commercially available PC that is pretty much guaranteed to work as a LinuxCNC controller. Or maybe a couple of different flavors of supported LinuxCNC controllers. Maybe one could boot from USB for LinuxCNC installation and use flash memory instead of a hard drive for small embedded LinuxCNC applications in dirty high vibration environments. There are definitely advantages to having a known good controller solution. Some people would love to spend $150 online and cross the controller off the To Do list instead of going on a Craig's List scavenger hunt. Others are machine integrators who might build 200 new machines a year and they don't want the hassle of validating a PC for LinuxCNC only to have the PC manufacturer make an unannounced cost reduction that breaks the realtime application. -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
andy pugh wrote: Why are some people so hung up on the idea that one box (even a box full of micros) must be used as the machine control? That is what EMC was conceived as. The whole underlying idea was to use cheap, off the shelf, PC hardware for machine control, rather than use expensive dedicated hardware. With low cost motion devices like smoothstepper, pokeys, A Smoothstepper is considerably more expensive than a cheap PC, and can only do one thing. As far as I know a Pokeys isn't a real-time motion control device at all, but a USB HID device? I think that this is the crux of the matter? There are a few USB linked 'co-processors' which have closed source code, but if there was a 'co-processor' with a suitable open-source code base then it would be interesting? Rasberry PI could be such a 'co-processor' but there are a few other 'light' linux boards. However as has been identified, they all need a 'real time' kernel or a 'dedicated driver' ( like Art's Mach3 windows one ) to run the actual I/O at a fast enough rate. We HAVE a suitable realtime kernel for x86 processors, and access to low priced ITX and even mini-ITX boards that will work happily with existing code, so why not simply build a 'co-processor' around this readily available hardware, and use a second one to provide the graphics and user interface? Is there really any need to spend time working on a realtime kernel for Rasberry PI which is not brimming with decent I/O when there are other options already. That time would probably be better spent on a 'proper' co-processor, one that has custom pulse generating hardware ... and nothing else? There are a number of good cheap 'real time processors' available even ones with an Ethernet port, but any fast data link would do? -- Lester Caine - G8HFL - Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On 9 October 2012 14:19, Bruce Layne linux...@thinkingdevices.com wrote: I think it'd also be great if there was a small, low cost commercially available PC that is pretty much guaranteed to work as a LinuxCNC controller. There is: http://www.roboard.com/ncbox-189.html It took a bit of work to get a kernel that worked well, but that is done now. http://www.linuxcnc.org/index.php/english/component/kunena/?func=viewcatid=18id=20692limit=6 -- atp If you can't fix it, you don't own it. http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 9:19 AM, Bruce Layne linux...@thinkingdevices.comwrote: LinuxCNC was initially conceived to directly control machine motion in realtime using a parallel port, and it does a very good job of that, but it now supports a number of commercially available I/O and motion control hardware products such as Mesa, Opto 22, etc. This is not true, parallel port control came to EMC years after hardware based options. That's still fairly evident in the structure of LinuxCNC. I'm reasonably certain that you could make a higher performance parallel port only version of LinuxCNC than the current system. But you lose too much of the power of LinuxCNC to motivate anyone to do that. We never really had a coprocessor version of linuxcnc because there was no hardware that really demanded it. Seems like people are doing it now, but it isn't compelling for the main project. It still seems to me that the way to go is to have a headless PC doing the real time and another system doing the user interface. I see no reason to trade the ease of development of a pc environment for some sort of embedded system hanging off the pc just because some people want to use old, cheap PCs. The truth is, a new, cheap PC will do the job all by itself. Eric -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On Tuesday 09 October 2012 11:14:43 Eric Keller did opine: [...] I see no reason to trade the ease of development of a pc environment for some sort of embedded system hanging off the pc just because some people want to use old, cheap PCs. The truth is, a new, cheap PC will do the job all by itself. Eric +10! In fact, I had to buy a pair of those new, cheap pc's this past year, to finally get a pc that could run faster the the motor voltage I had. Definite improvements obtained from replacing an old, formerly expensive power hog with the D525MW kit. Cheers, Gene -- There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene is up! Moneyliness is next to Godliness. -- Andries van Dam -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On Tue, 9 Oct 2012, Ron Ginger wrote: Date: Tue, 09 Oct 2012 07:52:16 -0400 From: Ron Ginger rongin...@roadrunner.com Reply-To: Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC) emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net To: emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux On 10/8/2012 10:29 PM, emc-users-requ...@lists.sourceforge.net wrote: have a machine that runs latency tests just fine and then gives me a real-time error when I start LCNC. Never really tracked it down because I always intended just to move on to a new machine. It can be frustrating. I think the era of machines that fail latency peaked when the P4 was new, but I'm not really sure about that. I suspect that Mach also runs better on machines with low latency and the machines that LCNC complains about also don't run Mach as well as they might. It's just that Mach ignores the long intervals, mostly because step/dir machines are somewhat immune to that issue. Eric These issues are why I am so strongly in favor of the dedicated microprocessor for the real time part. It is the norm in all computer systems- look inside that PC and Ill bet there are a dozen separate processors doing things like graphics, network, disk control, etc. PCs are wonderful GUI devices and have great computational ability. They were never designed to be real time systems. Why are some people so hung up on the idea that one box (even a box full of micros) must be used as the machine control? Well there are a lot of very good reasons for this: 1. If you do not have a real time OS you have no guarantees that even your buffered step/dir device will not run dry occasionally... 2. By moving part of motion control to a separate (usually proprietary) motion controller you have now created a more complex and limited control system because of buffering and communication delays (note that a lot of the big boys are moving to systems like Ethercat on guess what: real time PCs!) 3. LinuxCNC capabilities extend to all hardware. These capabilites include things that Mach has had trouble with from day one like rigid tapping and proper spindle syncronized threading. If a new feature is added to LinuxCNC, it becomes avalable to everyone from simple parallel port systems to high end dual feedback servo systems. This is not the case if you have to depend on the hardware manufacturer for the added features. You can solve these issues by moving more and more of LinuxCNC to the embedded processsor, but then you need a quite capable processor (and you would also like it to be a fairly stable and open platform) Turns out the the most stable open and inexpensive platform with good floating point performance. At the moment this is a PC. Note that most real time issues are really only for people using random used PCs, there are many new motherboards that have fine real time performance. step/dir machines are not immune to timing glitches. My knee mill uses a stepper on the knee for Z. I had a frequent glitch that lost position. I replaced the stepper with a BIG servo and had the same problem. I replaced the parallel port with a smoothstepper and the problem was solved- I put the stepper back and have never had a lost Z step. Yes, for windows this is a real problem. With low cost motion devices like smoothstepper, pokeys, kflop, centipede, etc it seems clear to me that fighting real time latency issues on PCs are a waste of effort. ron ginger -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users Peter Wallace Mesa Electronics (\__/) (='.'=) This is Bunny. Copy and paste bunny into your ()_() signature to help him gain world domination. -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On 10/09/2012 10:05 AM, andy pugh wrote: There is: http://www.roboard.com/ncbox-189.html It took a bit of work to get a kernel that worked well, but that is done now. http://www.linuxcnc.org/index.php/english/component/kunena/?func=viewcatid=18id=20692limit=6 I followed that NCbox-189 thread on the LinuxCNC forum several months ago. Pretty nifty. Needing to maintain ongoing support for the Vortex86 seemed a bit more complicated than needed and the difficulties with the ethernet hardware that managed to be one of the few exceptions to ethernet just works on Linux is unfortunate, but the very small form factor, very low power, and the possibility of installing and booting from flash were big winners. The fact that it has a parallel port AND the port on the other side with 24 bits of general purpose I/O were huge selling points to me. It'd make a very powerful and small integrated LinuxCNC controller. I followed the link you provided to the manufacturer's site. They don't sell the NCbox-189, so I followed their links to several of their distributors, and they didn't seem to be selling it either. So I'd still list availability as a problem, but that's probably a chicken and egg problem that would go away if there was a commitment from the manufacturer to provide long term hardware availability in exchange for a commitment from LinuxCNC developers to provide long term support. As an end user, if it was $200 or less (it should be!) and it was a true plug and play low-latency solution that didn't require patching kernels, then I'd be a potential customer. On 10/09/2012 11:01 AM, Eric Keller wrote: It still seems to me that the way to go is to have a headless PC doing the real time and another system doing the user interface. For me, that begs the question: Is the user interface so burdensome that the realtime operating system can't allocate top priority to the realtime job and have enough left over for the user interface? Or, stated differently, is there enough benefit to having two processors to justify the expense and complexity of such a system if one processor can generally get the job done with plenty of computing horsepower in reserve? YouTube isn't a critical application on my machines. Sure, it'd be convenient, and maybe a little geeky fun, to watch YouTube videos and read posts at BuildLog.net, CNC Zone, or the LinuxCNC forums while executing G code in realtime, but if it caused any problem, I have plenty of other options to surf and watch videos in the shop, including my iPod Touch which can easily be with me at any machine. -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 12:05 PM, Bruce Layne linux...@thinkingdevices.comwrote: For me, that begs the question: Is the user interface so burdensome that the realtime operating system can't allocate top priority to the realtime job and have enough left over for the user interface? The reason I am interested in doing this (sometimes) is not really for latency. A human doesn't really cause any problem for a real-time system. My thought is that packaging could be a lot better because nowadays you can mount a PC on the back of a monitor, feed it power and ethernet and be done. My obsolete desktop runs latency test just fine with 7uS of latency with the craziest loads I can put on it. I see no reason to worry about latency. I doubt I will run youtube on my mill that often, although my worst crash when I was trying to use Windows for machine control occurred because Bill Gates chose to check my email at an inopportune time. Eric -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
Gentlemen, I also coudn't find the NC Box 189 on the internet site of the manufacturer or his distributors. I sent them a mail asking for price and availability and got no answer, so far. Peter Blodow Ehrenberg Bruce Layne schrieb: On 10/09/2012 10:05 AM, andy pugh wrote: There is: http://www.roboard.com/ncbox-189.html It took a bit of work to get a kernel that worked well, but that is done now. http://www.linuxcnc.org/index.php/english/component/kunena/?func=viewcatid=18id=20692limit=6 I followed that NCbox-189 thread on the LinuxCNC forum several months ago. Pretty nifty. Needing to maintain ongoing support for the Vortex86 seemed a bit more complicated than needed and the difficulties with the ethernet hardware that managed to be one of the few exceptions to ethernet just works on Linux is unfortunate, but the very small form factor, very low power, and the possibility of installing and booting from flash were big winners. The fact that it has a parallel port AND the port on the other side with 24 bits of general purpose I/O were huge selling points to me. It'd make a very powerful and small integrated LinuxCNC controller. I followed the link you provided to the manufacturer's site. They don't sell the NCbox-189, so I followed their links to several of their distributors, and they didn't seem to be selling it either. So I'd still list availability as a problem, but that's probably a chicken and egg problem that would go away if there was a commitment from the manufacturer to provide long term hardware availability in exchange for a commitment from LinuxCNC developers to provide long term support. As an end user, if it was $200 or less (it should be!) and it was a true plug and play low-latency solution that didn't require patching kernels, then I'd be a potential customer. On 10/09/2012 11:01 AM, Eric Keller wrote: It still seems to me that the way to go is to have a headless PC doing the real time and another system doing the user interface. For me, that begs the question: Is the user interface so burdensome that the realtime operating system can't allocate top priority to the realtime job and have enough left over for the user interface? Or, stated differently, is there enough benefit to having two processors to justify the expense and complexity of such a system if one processor can generally get the job done with plenty of computing horsepower in reserve? YouTube isn't a critical application on my machines. Sure, it'd be convenient, and maybe a little geeky fun, to watch YouTube videos and read posts at BuildLog.net, CNC Zone, or the LinuxCNC forums while executing G code in realtime, but if it caused any problem, I have plenty of other options to surf and watch videos in the shop, including my iPod Touch which can easily be with me at any machine. -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
Bruce Layne wrote: LinuxCNC was initially conceived to directly control machine motion in realtime using a parallel port, No, not really true. The original EMC (1) was conceived to control a servo machine with a dumb motion interface board such as the Servo-to-Go. A board with encoder counters, velocity DACs and some digital I/O, but no processor. Steppers through the parallel port was later added. Then, after the change to EMC2 (which became LinuxCNC) many other interface devices and some outboard motion controllers were added. EMC2, mostly the addition of HAL between the interpreter and low-level motion hardware, was a way to make all this more flexible, but not to change any part of the existing functionality ar directly add new functionality. It was a way to make adding that functionality a lot easier, and that has certainly happened. At least, that is my take on the history of it. I love being able to pick up a cheap or free PC and use it as a machine controller, but I think it'd also be great if there was a small, low cost commercially available PC that is pretty much guaranteed to work as a LinuxCNC controller. Well, the Intel D525MW was that for a while, and as soon as some of the other vendor's products get qualified, we should be able to recommend a quite reasonably priced unit that will be available for a few years. A complete D525 system with box, power supply SSD drive and memory can be had for about $150 - 200, depending on what you need. If the RT-Preempt kernel turns out to be suitable for LinuxCNC, then we may be able to move to the BeagleBone ($89) or RasberryPi (price and availabilty not so clear). I personally think the Pi is a bit too low-powered to be usable, but the Beagle looks promising, especially if the GUI is hosted on another CPU. Jon -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On 10/9/2012 9:02 AM, emc-users-requ...@lists.sourceforge.net wrote: Why are some people so hung up on the idea that one box (even a box full of micros) must be used as the machine control? That is what EMC was conceived as. The whole underlying idea was to use cheap, off the shelf, PC hardware for machine control, rather than use expensive dedicated hardware. Might have been more true in 199? when EMC was started, not so true today. Micros are almost giveaway items now. With low cost motion devices like smoothstepper, pokeys, A Smoothstepper is considerably more expensive than a cheap PC, and can only do one thing. As far as I know a Pokeys isn't a real-time motion control device at all, but a USB HID device? Pokeys now has a motion control option- it will be shipping for Mach4. ron ginger -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On Tue, 2012-10-09 at 12:09 -0500, Jon Elson wrote: Bruce Layne wrote: LinuxCNC was initially conceived to directly control machine motion in realtime using a parallel port. Ah, if my memory serves me correctly we get to blame Matt Shaver for the stepper interface. ;-) IIRC he mentioned to Fred that is certainly would be nice if emc could run steppers... Dave No, not really true. The original EMC (1) was conceived to control a servo machine with a dumb motion interface board such as the Servo-to-Go. A board with encoder counters, velocity DACs and some digital I/O, but no processor. Steppers through the parallel port was later added. Then, after the change to EMC2 (which became LinuxCNC) many other interface devices and some outboard motion controllers were added. EMC2, mostly the addition of HAL between the interpreter and low-level motion hardware, was a way to make all this more flexible, but not to change any part of the existing functionality ar directly add new functionality. It was a way to make adding that functionality a lot easier, and that has certainly happened. At least, that is my take on the history of it. I love being able to pick up a cheap or free PC and use it as a machine controller, but I think it'd also be great if there was a small, low cost commercially available PC that is pretty much guaranteed to work as a LinuxCNC controller. Well, the Intel D525MW was that for a while, and as soon as some of the other vendor's products get qualified, we should be able to recommend a quite reasonably priced unit that will be available for a few years. A complete D525 system with box, power supply SSD drive and memory can be had for about $150 - 200, depending on what you need. If the RT-Preempt kernel turns out to be suitable for LinuxCNC, then we may be able to move to the BeagleBone ($89) or RasberryPi (price and availabilty not so clear). I personally think the Pi is a bit too low-powered to be usable, but the Beagle looks promising, especially if the GUI is hosted on another CPU. Jon -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
Ron; I appreciate what you are saying, and, everyone should have a voice. As someone fairly new to CNC, but not to computers in general, I'm really glad that: 1) LinuxCNC exists; 2) It has parallel port stepper control. It allowed me to start really easily, and, it works. Is it optimal? Nope. But, it has done everything that I have asked of it, without a missed step or crash (computer crash; tool into material crash not a Mach/LinuxCNC issue!) of my mill. Will I ever go for Mach 4 or Mach 3? I really don't see why. I'm CNC-ing an Emco Compact-8 lathe now, and expect that it will use LinuxCNC just fine. The stuff just works. The money saved on NOT having to purchase a Windows license, and a Mach license, and some of the hardware that seems to be required now for Mach, invested on taking my wife away on a little holiday, will pay dividends and whatnot that keeps my hobby going. Regards; John Alexander Stewart -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
The kflop looks interesting... But again - you are stuck with what bells and whistles are programed into it. Plus for the mach people that say you need to be a programmer to run linuxcnc - How about this quote from kflop... http://www.dynomotion.com/faq.html -Do I need to be a C Programmer to use your Controller? Yes. Certain operations such as Controller initialization and Homing involve User C Programs that Execute in KFLOP. So some modification of C Programs is required. We do this because it is the most powerful and flexible approach. It isn't necessary to be a C expert, but basic programming knowledge is helpful. Download the software and go to the C Programs Screen to get an idea the level of difficulty. Hmmm - I don't have to 'program' in linuxcnc unless I am doing very very advanced things... Plus everything is configured in one place. sam On 10/9/2012 7:58 AM, andy pugh wrote: On 9 October 2012 12:52, Ron Ginger rongin...@roadrunner.com wrote: Why are some people so hung up on the idea that one box (even a box full of micros) must be used as the machine control? That is what EMC was conceived as. The whole underlying idea was to use cheap, off the shelf, PC hardware for machine control, rather than use expensive dedicated hardware. With low cost motion devices like smoothstepper, pokeys, A Smoothstepper is considerably more expensive than a cheap PC, and can only do one thing. As far as I know a Pokeys isn't a real-time motion control device at all, but a USB HID device? -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
The reality is that a modern dual core mini itx PC board has plenty of power to drive a 3+ axis cnc machine while displaying a GUI in high res. I've done it, it works, no issues. So I don't think there is a speed problem at all regarding PC horsepower. I think there used to be one when we were dealing with 400 mhz single core X86 CPUs, but not with 1.8 ghz dual cores. Adding a lot of intelligent hardware to offload the PC tasks is simply not needed with LinuxCNC. It is not that we don't want to do it, it is not necessary at all, and probably undesirable. If you do the isol_cpu thing in grub with LinuxCNC it sticks all of your realtime tasks onto one core of a dual core cpu board. So you have almost two computers in one anyway. LinuxCNC does not suffer from the lack of a realtime OS as does Mach3/4.Getting repeatable millisecond response times out of the PC is not difficult with LinuxCNC. The number one problem with Mach3 is that it runs on Windows without the benefits of a RTOS.Because of that it currently has to utilize Arts LPT port stepper driver or offload ANY time critical processing to another CPU on an intelligent card via buffering ( like the Smoothstepper ). The Ethernet smoothstepper at $189 is not cheap. Especially when you add up the entire package: PC + Window$ + Mach3/4 + Smoothstepper + I/O break out for SS. You will eat up more than half a Kilo-buck on hardware and software before you have anything put together. Then you are stuck with whatever bugs the intelligent card developer left you with. Add up the costs for the Dynomotion cardset and you will tear up a $500 bill just on Dynomotion hardware before you fire up your C compiler so you can use it with Mach3. 8-OThat seems like an extreme effort just to avoid Linux. I have two Raspberry Pis now and they are slick little devices that consume very little power. I have one setup as a LAMP server with a full Apache install and it works. Not exactly a speed demon but it serves up web pages pretty quickly. I can control the I/O pins via a web page with some embedded PHP code. Next up is some python apps to actually make it control something.. I think it will make a good dirt cheap controller for remotely monitored applications via the web, or wifi or cell modem. That said I don't think it would make a good general purpose CNC controller unless it was greatly expanded with other hardware, and even then it would be very limited. Dave On 10/9/2012 1:27 PM, Ron Ginger wrote: On 10/9/2012 9:02 AM, emc-users-requ...@lists.sourceforge.net wrote: Why are some people so hung up on the idea that one box (even a box full of micros) must be used as the machine control? That is what EMC was conceived as. The whole underlying idea was to use cheap, off the shelf, PC hardware for machine control, rather than use expensive dedicated hardware. Might have been more true in 199? when EMC was started, not so true today. Micros are almost giveaway items now. With low cost motion devices like smoothstepper, pokeys, A Smoothstepper is considerably more expensive than a cheap PC, and can only do one thing. As far as I know a Pokeys isn't a real-time motion control device at all, but a USB HID device? Pokeys now has a motion control option- it will be shipping for Mach4. ron ginger -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
I always surf the net while the CNC programs are running, I see nothing wrong with that. I play music and watch youtube videos also. What is the hourly rate for watching ytube?  I need to know so I can tell my customers.This sounds like more fun than running another machine. Just kidding Terry  - Original Message - From: Igor Chudov ichu...@gmail.com To: Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC) emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net Cc: Sent: Monday, October 8, 2012 12:11 PM Subject: Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 11:45 AM, Roland Jollivet roland.jolli...@gmail.comwrote: On 7 October 2012 19:11, Len Shelton l...@probotix.com wrote: Most people choose Mach3 because they want to have a single box to run their CAD, CAM, control software on, or they are just afraid of Linux. What is not obvious is that to get it to even be half-way reliable - you have to strip down Windows to bare bones operation and never run any other software on that machine - which completely defeats the purpose. snip.. Why is that Lcnc users insist on doing everything on one machine? Like surfing the net while the machine is running. I always surf the net while the CNC programs are running, I see nothing wrong with that. I play music and watch youtube videos also. i I still don't get it. I imagine most Mach users do strip the junk out and use their box for what it's supposed to be: a machine controller. Do users of industrial Fanuc machines complain there is no game port on the side of the box? I think the biggest problem with the acceptance on Lcnc to newbies is trying to get a system up and working. Surely if Lcnc developers took a single (older) Ubuntu version, or whatever package, and kept upgrading Lcnc to that only, then there would be no problem of the latest 2GHz machines and up, not meeting the latency requirements. The latest version of Lcnc should be able to run?? on almost any hardware because the basic requiements have not changed since the first stepper systems came out. Admittedly, this does come from personal frustration, because I've gone through the schlep of converting at least 6 W$ PC's to Linux and running EMC, but none of them every had good enough latency. So I (more schlep) convert back to XP and run Mach with no problems. My firm belief is that Lcnc, Mach, and whoever else, should be aiming for headless systems. Stick the control box in the cabinet, and it's just.. a machine controller. Just.. like every industrial system. Then you play games and surf and run cad programs on the linked, desk PC. Regards Roland -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
[Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On 7 October 2012 19:11, Len Shelton l...@probotix.com wrote: Most people choose Mach3 because they want to have a single box to run their CAD, CAM, control software on, or they are just afraid of Linux. What is not obvious is that to get it to even be half-way reliable - you have to strip down Windows to bare bones operation and never run any other software on that machine - which completely defeats the purpose. snip.. Why is that Lcnc users insist on doing everything on one machine? Like surfing the net while the machine is running. I still don't get it. I imagine most Mach users do strip the junk out and use their box for what it's supposed to be: a machine controller. Do users of industrial Fanuc machines complain there is no game port on the side of the box? I think the biggest problem with the acceptance on Lcnc to newbies is trying to get a system up and working. Surely if Lcnc developers took a single (older) Ubuntu version, or whatever package, and kept upgrading Lcnc to that only, then there would be no problem of the latest 2GHz machines and up, not meeting the latency requirements. The latest version of Lcnc should be able to run?? on almost any hardware because the basic requiements have not changed since the first stepper systems came out. Admittedly, this does come from personal frustration, because I've gone through the schlep of converting at least 6 W$ PC's to Linux and running EMC, but none of them every had good enough latency. So I (more schlep) convert back to XP and run Mach with no problems. My firm belief is that Lcnc, Mach, and whoever else, should be aiming for headless systems. Stick the control box in the cabinet, and it's just.. a machine controller. Just.. like every industrial system. Then you play games and surf and run cad programs on the linked, desk PC. Regards Roland -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On 8 October 2012 17:45, Roland Jollivet roland.jolli...@gmail.com wrote: Admittedly, this does come from personal frustration, because I've gone through the schlep of converting at least 6 W$ PC's to Linux and running EMC, but none of them every had good enough latency. There shouldn't be any need for that much effort, you can boot from the LiveCD and run the latency test from there, without making any changes. Should only take 10 minutes, and if it fails then the machine is still just as it was. As for the Linux version, we are already getting moaned at for not supporting precise. Many folk want he new shiny, and in some case they might even have good reasons as hardware support keeps moving. A brand-new machine is quite likely not to work with Hardy. -- atp If you can't fix it, you don't own it. http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 11:45 AM, Roland Jollivet roland.jolli...@gmail.comwrote: On 7 October 2012 19:11, Len Shelton l...@probotix.com wrote: Most people choose Mach3 because they want to have a single box to run their CAD, CAM, control software on, or they are just afraid of Linux. What is not obvious is that to get it to even be half-way reliable - you have to strip down Windows to bare bones operation and never run any other software on that machine - which completely defeats the purpose. snip.. Why is that Lcnc users insist on doing everything on one machine? Like surfing the net while the machine is running. I always surf the net while the CNC programs are running, I see nothing wrong with that. I play music and watch youtube videos also. i I still don't get it. I imagine most Mach users do strip the junk out and use their box for what it's supposed to be: a machine controller. Do users of industrial Fanuc machines complain there is no game port on the side of the box? I think the biggest problem with the acceptance on Lcnc to newbies is trying to get a system up and working. Surely if Lcnc developers took a single (older) Ubuntu version, or whatever package, and kept upgrading Lcnc to that only, then there would be no problem of the latest 2GHz machines and up, not meeting the latency requirements. The latest version of Lcnc should be able to run?? on almost any hardware because the basic requiements have not changed since the first stepper systems came out. Admittedly, this does come from personal frustration, because I've gone through the schlep of converting at least 6 W$ PC's to Linux and running EMC, but none of them every had good enough latency. So I (more schlep) convert back to XP and run Mach with no problems. My firm belief is that Lcnc, Mach, and whoever else, should be aiming for headless systems. Stick the control box in the cabinet, and it's just.. a machine controller. Just.. like every industrial system. Then you play games and surf and run cad programs on the linked, desk PC. Regards Roland -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On 10/08/2012 01:02 PM, andy pugh wrote: There shouldn't be any need for that much effort, you can boot from the LiveCD and run the latency test from there, without making any changes. Should only take 10 minutes, and if it fails then the machine is still just as it was. That was my initial thought, as I've done the quick Live CD latency test on many used (free and almost free) PCs, but I thought maybe Roland had latency problems that cropped up in use, after the initial latency test. I had read of some machines with once-a-day kind of latency glitches. BTW - I've found very little correlation to processor speed and latency problems. I think all of the latency issues I've had were caused by rudely interrupting hardware. I'm sure some of those could have been fixed by disabling some hardware features, but with Craig's List full of old PCs, including a couple of guys in my area with persistent ads with plenty of PCs to choose from in a convenient one-stop-shopping experience, I didn't see any need to put much effort into it fixing a latency problem. I show up with two Live CDs and test the latency on two machines at once. If there's a problem, I go to the next machine. I've had good luck with the Compaq EVO (pizza box and tower configurations) and bad luck with Dell Optiplex towers. Here's a list of some known good and bad PCs. http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Latency-Test I love buying cheap PC hardware on Craig's List, installing LinuxCNC, peeling off the Windows badge from the case and replacing it with my little Tux Linux badges. I need to make some badges with the LinuxCNC version of Tux, with his hard hat, eye protection, and end mill. When buying cheap Craig's List PC hardware, I always feel like I'm buying droids from Jawas. On 10/08/2012 01:11 PM, Igor Chudov wrote: I always surf the net while the CNC programs are running, I see nothing wrong with that. I play music and watch youtube videos also. I plan on having a basement shop with LinuxCNC running a lathe, milling machine, and the laser I'm currently building. I'll probably surf and watch YouTube videos on one machine while one or two other machines are making parts. :-) I'm learning a lot by reading the messages posted to this list. It's like being immersed in LinuxCNC, much like the immersion technique for learning a foreign language. -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 6:11 PM, Igor Chudov ichu...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 11:45 AM, Roland Jollivet roland.jolli...@gmail.comwrote: On 7 October 2012 19:11, Len Shelton l...@probotix.com wrote: Most people choose Mach3 because they want to have a single box to run their CAD, CAM, control software on, or they are just afraid of Linux. What is not obvious is that to get it to even be half-way reliable - you have to strip down Windows to bare bones operation and never run any other software on that machine - which completely defeats the purpose. snip.. Why is that Lcnc users insist on doing everything on one machine? Like surfing the net while the machine is running. I always surf the net while the CNC programs are running, I see nothing wrong with that. I play music and watch youtube videos also. I was running a buildbot slave for a mysql fork called mariadb http://mariadb.org/ So if you get things right you can run just about anything on the cnc box My main problem would be if uncontrolled the user processes would be running at 100% making it a little unusable as far as a user was concerned, just needed pushing down a little in the priority. Dave Caroline -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 1:55 PM, Bruce Layne linux...@thinkingdevices.comwrote: On 10/08/2012 01:02 PM, andy pugh wrote: There shouldn't be any need for that much effort, you can boot from the LiveCD and run the latency test from there, without making any changes. Should only take 10 minutes, and if it fails then the machine is still just as it was. That was my initial thought, as I've done the quick Live CD latency test on many used (free and almost free) PCs, but I thought maybe Roland had latency problems that cropped up in use, after the initial latency test. I had read of some machines with once-a-day kind of latency glitches. I have a machine that runs latency tests just fine and then gives me a real-time error when I start LCNC. Never really tracked it down because I always intended just to move on to a new machine. It can be frustrating. I think the era of machines that fail latency peaked when the P4 was new, but I'm not really sure about that. I suspect that Mach also runs better on machines with low latency and the machines that LCNC complains about also don't run Mach as well as they might. It's just that Mach ignores the long intervals, mostly because step/dir machines are somewhat immune to that issue. Eric -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
Eric Keller wrote: I have a machine that runs latency tests just fine and then gives me a real-time error when I start LCNC. Have you run glxgears while the latency test was running? I have seen some cases where a lot of memory accesses by a shared-memory graphics system can cause major latency problems. Sometimes turning off some graphics optimizations in the system/preferences menu can fix that, and the graphics slowdown is not terribly bad for the Axis 3-D preview. Jon -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
The best thing is it will help Linux get out of the 'for geeks only' view that many people have. I doubt this will be the case because its mostly geeks who are doing the CNC thing. If you have a CNC machine and you think you are not a geek - you are in denial. But a competitor to LinuxCNC in Mach4? Well as someone who takes CNC technical support calls everyday, my opinion is tainted by Mach3. Not only does the Mach3 interface remind me of three-year-olds with crayons with all of its flashy thingies and inconsistent methods, but Mach3 is full of bugs that I doubt that the developers are even aware of. I think its terrible that they charge $175 for a license without offering sufficient support. They take your money but then instruct you to fill all of your support needs through the community. I would NEVER buy a brand-new retail product from any company without having a telephone number to call them on. Why do I think they are unaware of the bugs? Because they don't have any bug reporting built into the software, and they don't have a phone to call. Some users will go through the support forums, but most of them are calling us. They used to call Keling, too - but he got sick of all the Mach3 calls so he quit publishing his phone number (although it looks like he decided to give it another try upon launching his re-brand). At least once a week we are able to fix a Mach3 issue by uninstalling and reinstalling Mach3 - often times because Mach3 quit accessing the parallel port. But most of the time the issues are just bizarre behavior, like moving over 4 in the Y approx 2 hours into a 4 hour file, and continuing like nothing happened. Very hard to witness because of the time frame, but also impossible to resolve. Most people choose Mach3 because they want to have a single box to run their CAD, CAM, control software on, or they are just afraid of Linux. What is not obvious is that to get it to even be half-way reliable - you have to strip down Windows to bare bones operation and never run any other software on that machine - which completely defeats the purpose. In Mach3's defense - I imagine that most of its problems comes from Windows. But loading a driver that sits underneath Windows (as it was described to me) is a hack, at best - and it just sounds dirty. Will Mach4 be any better? I don't know. Are they gonna start taking phone calls? If not, then I suspect little will change in the bugs department. If they can't handle all of the bugs on Windows given all of its different hardware/software configuration possibilities, then why do they think they can pile on more by porting it to Linux and Mac? With LinuxCNC, if you make it to the live environment from the CD, then Ubuntu found all of the drivers it needs and it will install and work flawlessly. Sure it can be more difficult to configure advanced features - but that's only because it is far more flexible and powerful. LinuxCNC also does not have telephone support, but LinuxCNC does not have the sort of problems that require telephone support. So is Mach4 a new competitor to LinuxCNC - not in my opinion, not even close. Len On 10/6/2012 6:14 PM, Jack Coats wrote: I am a Linux and open source advocate for just about every use, but I do see good things from there being commercial software available for Linux too. Will LinuxCNC and Mach go head to head? Yes, for some. But I don't see Mach taking over the machine control market on Linux, but it will be a good tool to add to the quiver of things that run on Linux, proving that Linux isn't 'just for geeks'. I spoke to a geek from Oracle that was running Oracle on Linux long before it was 'made available' on Linux. Not releasing it for Linux was totally a marketing decision. The developer I spoke with said he had to change a couple of includes when he re-compiled a little, but it was considered a 'no change' port from his perspective. (Oracle was mainly running on SUN at the time). And it was a big deal for 'commercial users' to get Oracle supported on Linux, giving Linux a lot of legitimacy. I see the Mach change to just be another positive step. -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On Sun, 2012-10-07 at 12:11 -0500, Len Shelton wrote: The best thing is it will help Linux get out of the 'for geeks only' view that many people have. I doubt this will be the case because its mostly geeks who are doing the CNC thing. If you have a CNC machine and you think you are not a geek - you are in denial. But a competitor to LinuxCNC in Mach4? Well as someone who takes CNC technical support calls everyday, my opinion is tainted by Mach3. Not only does the Mach3 interface remind me of three-year-olds with crayons with all of its flashy thingies and inconsistent methods, but Mach3 is full of bugs that I doubt that the developers are even aware of. I think its terrible that they charge $175 for a license without offering sufficient support. They take your money but then instruct you to fill all of your support needs through the community. I would NEVER buy a brand-new retail product from any company without having a telephone number to call them on. Why do I think they are unaware of the bugs? Because they don't have any bug reporting built into the software, and they don't have a phone to call. Some users will go through the support forums, but most of them are calling us. They used to call Keling, too - but he got sick of all the Mach3 calls so he quit publishing his phone number (although it looks like he decided to give it another try upon launching his re-brand). At least once a week we are able to fix a Mach3 issue by uninstalling and reinstalling Mach3 - often times because Mach3 quit accessing the parallel port. But most of the time the issues are just bizarre behavior, like moving over 4 in the Y approx 2 hours into a 4 hour file, and continuing like nothing happened. Very hard to witness because of the time frame, but also impossible to resolve. Most people choose Mach3 because they want to have a single box to run their CAD, CAM, control software on, or they are just afraid of Linux. What is not obvious is that to get it to even be half-way reliable - you have to strip down Windows to bare bones operation and never run any other software on that machine - which completely defeats the purpose. In Mach3's defense - I imagine that most of its problems comes from Windows. But loading a driver that sits underneath Windows (as it was described to me) is a hack, at best - and it just sounds dirty. Will Mach4 be any better? I don't know. Are they gonna start taking phone calls? If not, then I suspect little will change in the bugs department. If they can't handle all of the bugs on Windows given all of its different hardware/software configuration possibilities, then why do they think they can pile on more by porting it to Linux and Mac? With LinuxCNC, if you make it to the live environment from the CD, then Ubuntu found all of the drivers it needs and it will install and work flawlessly. Sure it can be more difficult to configure advanced features - but that's only because it is far more flexible and powerful. LinuxCNC also does not have telephone support, but LinuxCNC does not have the sort of problems that require telephone support. So is Mach4 a new competitor to LinuxCNC - not in my opinion, not even close. Len So in a nutshell: no sweat! They do their thing and we do ours. Dave On 10/6/2012 6:14 PM, Jack Coats wrote: I am a Linux and open source advocate for just about every use, but I do see good things from there being commercial software available for Linux too. Will LinuxCNC and Mach go head to head? Yes, for some. But I don't see Mach taking over the machine control market on Linux, but it will be a good tool to add to the quiver of things that run on Linux, proving that Linux isn't 'just for geeks'. I spoke to a geek from Oracle that was running Oracle on Linux long before it was 'made available' on Linux. Not releasing it for Linux was totally a marketing decision. The developer I spoke with said he had to change a couple of includes when he re-compiled a little, but it was considered a 'no change' port from his perspective. (Oracle was mainly running on SUN at the time). And it was a big deal for 'commercial users' to get Oracle supported on Linux, giving Linux a lot of legitimacy. I see the Mach change to just be another positive step. -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
Len Shelton wrote: Not only does the Mach3 interface remind me of three-year-olds with crayons with all of its flashy thingies and inconsistent methods Ah HAH! So I'm NOT the only one who thinks that! Jon -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
Get in line Jon.. ;-) That has been a long standing complaint of Mach3 for many, many years. For some reason they never got around to cleaning up the standard screen set. I have idea why. I am sure that when Art first made up that screen, that he thought it would be revised in 6 months or so.. but it never happened. Dave On 10/7/2012 5:40 PM, Jon Elson wrote: Len Shelton wrote: Not only does the Mach3 interface remind me of three-year-olds with crayons with all of its flashy thingies and inconsistent methods Ah HAH! So I'm NOT the only one who thinks that! Jon -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On 7 October 2012 22:40, Jon Elson el...@pico-systems.com wrote: Not only does the Mach3 interface remind me of three-year-olds with crayons with all of its flashy thingies and inconsistent methods Ah HAH! So I'm NOT the only one who thinks that! I can't recall who it was who said that Mach UIs tended to look like fruit machines. (slot machine / one-armed bandit) but there is definitely that tendency -- atp If you can't fix it, you don't own it. http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
Len Shelton wrote: Not only does the Mach3 interface remind me of three-year-olds with crayons with all of its flashy thingies and inconsistent methods Ah HAH! So I'm NOT the only one who thinks that! Jon But you need to specify which Mach screen set you are talking about- there are truly hundreds around, including in English and several languages. Several are even products which people sell as addons. They are not all the same by any measure. And I contend that is one of Machs major strengths. Among others I am familiar with screen sets that operate a brownie cutter in a bakery and an OEM that sells many hundreds of quilting machines per year. Im sure none of you have even seen those screen sets. ron ginger -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
But a competitor to LinuxCNC in Mach4? Well as someone who takes CNC technical support calls everyday, my opinion is tainted by Mach3. Not only does the Mach3 interface remind me of three-year-olds with crayons with all of its flashy thingies and inconsistent methods, but Mach3 is full of bugs that I doubt that the developers are even aware of. I think its terrible that they charge $175 for a license without offering sufficient support. They take your money but then instruct you to fill all of your support needs through the community. I would NEVER buy a brand-new retail product from any company without having a telephone number to call them on. A lot of hobbyists look at it as the entrance fee to get into the club so they can participate in the forum, which is really the basis for Mach3's support. Compared to anything CNC related, $175 is pretty cheap.For instance - a single Gecko 203V stepper drive going for about $140 now. Still, if I have problems with a Gecko 203V drive I can pickup the phone and call them and they do answer the phone. The last time I called Geckodrive with a tech issue on a G540 drive earlier this year, Marris answered the phone (the founder of the company) and I talked with him for almost an hour! Why do I think they are unaware of the bugs? Because they don't have any bug reporting built into the software, and they don't have a phone to call. Some users will go through the support forums, but most of them are calling us. They used to call Keling, too - but he got sick of all the Mach3 calls so he quit publishing his phone number (although it looks like he decided to give it another try upon launching his re-brand). You might know this, but there was a bug tracking system setup a while ago.. and lots and lots of bugs were reported and the list started to get pretty long. After a while, the list disappeared. For some reason it wasn't working so good?? So it was quietly removed. Hmm At least once a week we are able to fix a Mach3 issue by uninstalling and reinstalling Mach3 - often times because Mach3 quit accessing the parallel port. But most of the time the issues are just bizarre behavior, like moving over 4 in the Y approx 2 hours into a 4 hour file, and continuing like nothing happened. Very hard to witness because of the time frame, but also impossible to resolve. More than a few XML file corruption issues also I suppose? There has been known structural issues with the Mach3 for years, and that is really the gist of why Mach4 is being developed from scratch more or less. There is too much to fix in Mach3. Most people choose Mach3 because they want to have a single box to run their CAD, CAM, control software on, or they are just afraid of Linux. What is not obvious is that to get it to even be half-way reliable - you have to strip down Windows to bare bones operation and never run any other software on that machine - which completely defeats the purpose. In Mach3's defense - I imagine that most of its problems comes from Windows. But loading a driver that sits underneath Windows (as it was described to me) is a hack, at best - and it just sounds dirty. Windows is not real time by a long shot. However much of Mach3 was written with the premise that tasks will execute in a timely manner, even though that cannot be guaranteed with Windows. So Mach3 works most of the time... unless those exceptions occur. Then... not so well. Hopefully Mach4 will operate in a different manner. That said; I have had good luck using Mach3 in the past on some commercial machines by stripping Windows down to almost nothing, (no other programs run at the same time), I don't use any fancy VB macros, and I offload other logic tasks to a small PLC connected to Mach3 via Modbus.The PC only runs Gcode and communicates to the PLC to turn bits on and off via Mcodes. Beyond that I use LinuxCNC as it is much more powerful, flexible, and reliable. Will Mach4 be any better? I don't know. Are they gonna start taking phone calls? If not, then I suspect little will change in the bugs department. If they can't handle all of the bugs on Windows given all of its different hardware/software configuration possibilities, then why do they think they can pile on more by porting it to Linux and Mac? Don't be joy killerEveryone needs to dream once in a while.. ;-) With LinuxCNC, if you make it to the live environment from the CD, then Ubuntu found all of the drivers it needs and it will install and work flawlessly. Sure it can be more difficult to configure advanced features - but that's only because it is far more flexible and powerful. LinuxCNC also does not have telephone support, but LinuxCNC does not have the sort of problems that require telephone support. So is Mach4 a new competitor to LinuxCNC - not in my opinion, not even close. Len I have to agree.. LinuxCNC
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
Dave wrote: That has been a long standing complaint of Mach3 for many, many years. For some reason they never got around to cleaning up the standard screen set. I have idea why. I am sure that when Art first made up that screen, that he thought it would be revised in 6 months or so.. but it never happened. Well I ship a single screen package with all the machines I supply. I don't recognise 'full of bugs' ... it turns out production quantities on my customers sites happily day in day out. I would not use it with a lathe, but for a 3 or 4 axis mill it does a job and has done for years. Now LinucCNC does have an alternative to that package these days, but while something is working customers tend not to want to change, so Mach4 will compete with a current LinuxCNC build on a more level playing field. But new offerings are shipped with both Mach3 and LinuxCNC at the moment until I get more practical experience in production ... and can support customers over the phone :) -- Lester Caine - G8HFL - Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
But you need to specify which Mach screen set you are talking about Doesn't matter. Most Mach3 users chose Mach3 because either A) its popular and more well known - a CNC catch phrase if-you-will; or B) they are afraid of Linux. Now B is not necessarily the cause of A, but I would bet that most Mach3 users are both A B. Maybe its not fair to stereotype, but I'd have to say that most Mach3 users tend to be the less technical users and never ever make it past the default screen sets. Any Mach3 users posting on the LinuxCNC mailing list are amongst the exceptions. Keep in mind, I spend 80% of my working day speaking to both Mach3 and LinuxCNC users, but mostly Mach3 users because of the reasons above and because LinuxCNC users tend to need less help. I'm trying not to speak in absolutes, but I observe it day in day out. Your experiences may differ. Len -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On Sun, 7 Oct 2012 23:10:04 +0100, you wrote: On 7 October 2012 22:40, Jon Elson el...@pico-systems.com wrote: Not only does the Mach3 interface remind me of three-year-olds with crayons with all of its flashy thingies and inconsistent methods Ah HAH! So I'm NOT the only one who thinks that! I can't recall who it was who said that Mach UIs tended to look like fruit machines. (slot machine / one-armed bandit) but there is definitely that tendency Me, John Stevenson, John Prentice, Dave and many others, but strangely, many newbies, who paid a license fee like screens with faux wood effects, etc. G I, for my sins, wrote the lathe screens. I got slagged terribly - but they were the closest copy of Fanuc screens that were possible with the tools available at the time suitable for a touch screen monitor. Commercial ops liked them, everybody else hated them :) The standard mill screens are so cluttered with obtuse crap that they are a joke. I still use Mach for most things, because I can jog in feedhold and CV works, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've been off the first screen. The interface is very much secondary to me, I can ignore the bells and whistles, all I want to do is load my CAM produced program and run it on a touch screen. If something untoward happens I want to be able to feed hold, jog away, clear some swarf, check it, replace an insert, reset a tool offset or touch off again and run. I can do it with Mach, but not with Linuxcnc. Please don't tell me that you can do it with a stop / run from here both Mach and Linuxcnc depend on how intelligent you choice of line was. Steve Blackmore -- -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
[Emc-users] Mach on Linux
Looks like LinuxCNC is about to get some competition.. From: Brian Barker bri...@machsupport.com Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2012 14:03:21 -0400 Mach4 can run on Linux and Mac and Windows Also we are looking at CE :) Also Art Fenerty recently posted this about threading It is based on encoder feedback for position and isnt finalised. It is based on a proper solution where the steps fed MUST equal the encoder counts recieved and uses an algorithm that computes the time correlation, so that if one stops the spindle the Z stops. You could in theory rotate the spindle by hand and the threading will stay in sync. One reason it isnt finished is I need to test how a backwards responce may be necessary in case one rotates backwards after stopping.. Darwin already handles the encoders properly, so any new threading will be completly unlike the old one and should be 100% repeatable with no time variation nonsense. Of course Mach4 will NOT be free. Steve Blackmore -- -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
I only recently signed up to this list, so I didn't get the Mach 4 On Linux news from a couple of months back. I'm glad that Mach 4 is going to be running on native Linux and Mac systems. I use Linux for all my computing needs, and recently I've been starting to employ LinuxCNC for several different machine control applications. I'm liking LinuxCNC, but I think there's a good market for Mach in the Linux world. I think too many people have the attitude that all Linux software must be free, and that attitude has discouraged companies from developing commercial software for Linux, and that has ultimately discouraged Linux from more wide spread use. For example, if someone sold $100 small business accounting software for Linux that would import and convert QuickBooks data, we'd see a LOT more Linux use in the business world. Whenever a software developer creates a Linux version of their commercial software and a large portion of the Linux community laughs in their face and tells them that Linux users don't BUY software, we have no right to complain about the lack of commercial software for Linux. Open source is great for many different reasons, and I love the freedom of a one click installation from a repository without the dreadful Windows installers, end user licensing agreements, being accused of software piracy because you thought you might be able to use the software that you bought on your home PC and your notebook PC when traveling, etc. But there is a place for commercial software, even in the Linux world. As much as I like LinuxCNC, and I'm impressed at the rate at which it's maturing, it's still not known for its ease of setup. Mach is still better at that hand holding. If we have a choice to run LinuxCNC or Mach 4 under Linux, that can't be a bad thing. There are some CNC users who would love the no-virus, free, fast-on-cheap-old-PCs advantages of Linux but would like to spend some money to streamline their hardware and software setup, and Mach 4 on Linux will be an ideal solution for them. Even though I'm a big fan of LinuxCNC, I'm tempted to buy Mach 4 on Linux simply as a free market reward for the developers, as my way of thanking them for stepping out of their Windows comfort zone and embracing Linux. On 10/06/2012 04:21 PM, jeremy youngs wrote: i thought we covered all of this mach stuff a couple months back? I just dont see the competition, I think that simply refer to all of the previous posts is sufficient. It does bear to say if you are going to run linux then why would you pay for you cnc software? I think this to be a marketing ploy of little real interest. just my .02 -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
This is great news for Linux. Of course, I am very happy with EMC2 i On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Steve Blackmore st...@pilotltd.net wrote: Looks like LinuxCNC is about to get some competition.. From: Brian Barker bri...@machsupport.com Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2012 14:03:21 -0400 Mach4 can run on Linux and Mac and Windows Also we are looking at CE :) Also Art Fenerty recently posted this about threading It is based on encoder feedback for position and isnt finalised. It is based on a proper solution where the steps fed MUST equal the encoder counts recieved and uses an algorithm that computes the time correlation, so that if one stops the spindle the Z stops. You could in theory rotate the spindle by hand and the threading will stay in sync. One reason it isnt finished is I need to test how a backwards responce may be necessary in case one rotates backwards after stopping.. Darwin already handles the encoders properly, so any new threading will be completly unlike the old one and should be 100% repeatable with no time variation nonsense. Of course Mach4 will NOT be free. Steve Blackmore -- -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
This issue with mach on linux is (the way I understand it) is it is going to be just a fancy gui that controls an external motion device. (no realtime at all) So - you have to pick the external motion device that has all the features you want. While the interface hardware for linuxcnc is relatively dumb as all is done within linuxcnc. I for one really like that. Very flexable. As peter from mesa has mentioned - That makes it so any new realtime thing added to linuxcnc is available to all hardware. (you can even rigid tap with just the printer port if you want to.) sam On 10/06/2012 04:29 PM, jeremy youngs wrote: some good points to be made bruce, n o we shouldnt laugh in the face of art, I respect what he has done. However after being here for over a year i can tell you every question I have had has been answered, typically in less than 24 hrs, the irc and wikis i believe just flat top what mach has to offer. I would also like to state that my last lcnc install and setup ran about 40 min and the most difficulty was in deciphering the chenglish directions from the chinese drivers. All one has to do is load, open stepconf plug in numbers and test having run and setup 4 tormachs i see no real difference in setup. Certainly if doing a multi axis or custom setup mach simply does not compete and its difficult for me to here the (its hard to load arguement ) when 2.5 lcnc is so easy . and the support is excellent ( another plug for all of you folks that have cured my ignorance over the last year, thanx) as to hard to load I have to say cnc machining in general requires a tremendous amount of knowledge and one would expect software as all encompassing as lcnc to have some technology nuances that require one to learn. I think it boils down to what the end user wants, I would also have to ask what has art done to the linux side what kernel does it run on is it rtai? without testing we will not know if its any easier and im not paying 175 to test software I know is not as good as what im running with the support of hundreds in this community (end of selfish lcnc plug) :) One happy lcnc customer -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On 6 October 2012 21:14, Steve Blackmore st...@pilotltd.net wrote: Mach4 can run on Linux and Mac and Windows Also we are looking at CE :) Mach on Mac could be handy. I have a Reprap/Ultimaker sized gap next to my Mac. Though http://www.ecklersoft.com is looking like a more tempting way to make things from my Mac. -- atp If you can't fix it, you don't own it. http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
I am a Linux and open source advocate for just about every use, but I do see good things from there being commercial software available for Linux too. The best thing is it will help Linux get out of the 'for geeks only' view that many people have. Will LinuxCNC and Mach go head to head? Yes, for some. But I don't see Mach taking over the machine control market on Linux, but it will be a good tool to add to the quiver of things that run on Linux, proving that Linux isn't 'just for geeks'. I spoke to a geek from Oracle that was running Oracle on Linux long before it was 'made available' on Linux. Not releasing it for Linux was totally a marketing decision. The developer I spoke with said he had to change a couple of includes when he re-compiled a little, but it was considered a 'no change' port from his perspective. (Oracle was mainly running on SUN at the time). And it was a big deal for 'commercial users' to get Oracle supported on Linux, giving Linux a lot of legitimacy. I see the Mach change to just be another positive step. -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux
On Saturday 06 October 2012 21:12:35 jeremy youngs did opine: did I mention just rehashing the previous posts would be sufficient? ;) ha ha ha as to your expertise and experience gene it is highly regarded especially when discussing situations such as this thanx for the story. so If i wanted to take a poll who wants to talk mach ? ( just being fecisious here for amusement) have a good one all Well, since I am close to, if not the senior member here, my occasional BTDT stories will I hope be of assistance to the younger set who haven't been to all the dog pony shows I have been to in my 78 years. Words to the wise, if they will listen (and take with a suitable modicum of salt) from somebody who is still pulling on his boot straps from time to time. ;-) As for talking Mach, TBT I have never touched it as I don't allow winderz on the premises unless I'm poking about in somebody else's machine. Something I discourage generally. More headache than profit. Cheers, Gene -- There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene is up! We're all in this alone. -- Lily Tomlin -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
