The magoroty of people who do not want to make CNC tools their hoby and just want to cut metal, wood or plastic, they would be best sewrved by one of the “out of the box” solutions, like Acorn. No one, except Torch sells an LCNC solution that come rewady to run with hardware and pre-istalled software. Most users will want that.
Then if you are selling a turn-key setup, LCNC requires more expensive hardware. 90% of the market is going to be runnng a very simple 3-axis CNC router. Yoiu can buy PCBs that have a poerfull microcontroller and some stepper moter drivers for $40 retail or have one made in china for 1/3rd that price. You then but $50 worth of electronics in a $10 enclosure and sell it for $300. The end user will never in a million years complain that he can not edit the config file to run industrial servos over Ethercat. On the other hand many people do seem to make CNC a hobby even if they really don’t need to make a ‘billion CNC’d parts. For them LCNC is prefect and a machine that “just works” would be usless because they’d have nothing to do. > > What I am having good luck with running all the fancy stuff for 3d printers > on them is the currently $65 bananapi-m5. All 4 usb ports are usb3 so speeds > are not a problem. I am just now bringing up an old Ender 5 Plus that died a > couple years ago, able to run at 30mm/second max because it comes with a puny > Y motor, but now has 2 more bigger higher voltage power supply's, the X&Y > motors are now stepper/servo's, I belted the z motors together and unplugged > one so bed tilt is locked, lots of heavy flying weight is now CF tubing, much > lighter to throw around, and its loafing at 200mm/sec speeds. What it > formerly took 3 days to make is now done in 17 hours. That bpi-m5 is talking > to the $52 control card that runs the printer with a single usb-C cable. > > I have not tried linuxcnc on one of them but it runs fine on an rpi4b with 2 > gigs of ram, Gene, if that Pi4 is running Klipper, of course it is not loaded up. Kipper pushes 100% of the real-time work onto the MCU. The Pi only has to read the g-code file and do the motion planning and run the web server based GUI. Screen rendering and mouse tracking and all the low-level GUI stuff is done on the user’s web browser. LCNC is just the opposite, so you can’t compare. Klipper does not care at all which OS you run. It runs very well in a virtual machine or even on a Pi-zero. I’m using a Pi3, 1GB and see only 8% CPU usage In fact you can run multiple copies of Klipper on one computer and drive multiple printers at the same time. > running my 11x54 Sheldon lathe. Install the build-essential & the latest > python 3, hook it to a breakout board fed by a usb-3 cable, and build lcnc > from master's src. It ought to just work. Might have to build a rt kernel, > but my 3d printers don't seem to mind the current jammy offering. But let’s say you were a sign maker and wanted to cut out plastic letters with a CO2 laser. You bill your customers at $125 per machine-hour. How many hours do you want to spend learning to build real-time kernels, it costs you $125 for every one of those non-billable hours. And on top of that maybe marketing and sales are not getting done while you work on a DIY CNC project. Same with plumbing, It is not technically hard to repair pipes, snake drains, or replace a water heater. But what if you own a restaurant? The owner is more than happy to pay the $250/hr rate to have two plumbers and a well-stocked truck show up and fix the problem because he has to close the business until the problem is fixed. So in an industrial setting DIY could very easily be much more expensive than buying a turn-key system or even hiring the work done for you. But on the other hand, many of us are not in a situation where “toime is money” and LCNC is a good fit. But it is not a good fit at all for everyone. > It ID's itself as: > > Linux bpi51e5p 6.6.16-current-meson64 #1 SMP PREEMPT. > > Arm64 stuff is encroaching on our territory, its power miserly AND stable as > the Rock of Gibralter. Uptimes are from power outage to power outage. >> Just curious if this is finally the step into the single small box with >> LinuxCNC or MachineKit Turnkey CNC system for the older MACH or other users. >> Or has the market now matured enough with other solutions like the Centroid >> ACORN >> https://www.centroidcnc.com/centroid_diy/acorn_cnc_controller.html >> and it's pointless to even bother with LinuxCNC? >> John >> _______________________________________________ >> Emc-users mailing list >> Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net >> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users >> . > > Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET. > -- > "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: > soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." > -Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940) > If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. > - Louis D. Brandeis > > > > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users