On Sat, Jul 14, 2007 at 06:55:38PM -0700, stephan wintner wrote: > Hey Folks, > > I am a newbie starting to look at this - I want a small CNC lathe (and later > on a mill) for hobby use. I do have some items which would not be practical > to do on a manual setup. I am looking hard at sherlines package, which seems > to be hard to beat priceswise, and I have found no other CNC equipped > benchtop mini-lathe (i.e. less than 100 pounds) for a reasonable price. > (MaxNC has one, but it has no tailstock) > > The sherline package uses EMC. > > The difficulty is I do not have nor do I want a large box computer. I do > have an older g4 Powerbook. From what I have read, it is possible to get > Ubuntu running on a PowerPC mac. And hence presumable I can get EMC running > on it, right ? (I know, I can try that for free - and will)
I've built EMC2 in simulator mode (without a realtime subsystem) under Ubuntu on my ancient powerpc system. In simulator mode you cannot control any hardware but you can have a look at the software. I don't know the status of RTAI for powerpc but I think they are working on it. Once that stabilizes it's likely that EMC2 will run on powerpc in realtime, but that still leaves hardware drivers a big unknown. In my opinion, this is not a task for someone new to EMC and RTAI. If you want to control a mill with EMC today you will need to get a PC, and unfortunately, most laptop PCs are not going to work reliably. Laptops are notoriously bad for running realtime software, since they have power saving and other things built-in, and these often conflict with the realtime system and they cannot be disabled. The smallest machine I've personally had in my hands and tested successfully with the RTAI latency tests was an older PIII HP E-pc like this one: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=330146226524 This machine is really quite small and with a RAM uprade (256MB) it would be suitable. It has a parallel port but no PCI slot. If you buy one be sure it comes with the power cube; for some reason most of them don't. Chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
