Linux CNC

[RayStoner]

I know this is a popular choice among the hobby machinist for control of lathes/mills/routers/plasma cutters, etc. One of the challenges of using Linux CNC has always been the limitations of the parallel port. The latency of a PC is pretty critical to the success of the build.

In the world of Mach3 there are many options to take the burden of step generation off the processor of the PC and move it to a controller...smoothstepper, Galil, UC100 and the like.

Mesa Electronics offers a step generation/control solution that is pretty cost effective. The 5i25 is $89 and is a pretty straight forward installation, there is a configuration manager in LinuxCNC that will help you set the system up to use the 5i25. If you don't have a PCI slot to use, they have the 6i25, essentially the same card in PCI-E.

The offer configurations firmware for most of the popular breakout boards, the G540 is a pretty popular one.

They offer breakout boards too, including a 5 axis step and direction card (7i76) that offers 48 general purpose I/O pins, isolated spindle speed control with encoder feedback. A 6 axis +-10V (7i77) analog servo interface with a ton of general purpose I/O and spindle speed control, etc.

One of the really cool aspects of these boards is that they are a the boards that Tormach chooses for their pro-sumer level CNC machines. They recently converted to LinuxCNC and set up one of the best conversational front ends I've ever seen. They call it path pilot and with some minor effort, it is usable outside of their machines. Tormach offers the "Path Pilot Restore Disk" for $30 here.

The linux CNC forums have a good description on how to get path pilot to work with your machine.

You can find many videos of using path pilot, installing it, etc on Youtube too.

Thought others might be interested.