2012/3/8 charles green <xxzzb...@yahoo.com>: > > the disposal liabilty pcs of a decade vintage have plenty of capacity to > function as machine controllers, so why not repurpose them to that task > rather than a dumpsite?
Ok, I totally agree with the point on nature-responsible (hopefully I spelled the term correctly) attitude. I just have several notes: 1) it is becoming pretty expensive to get a HDD with non-sata (meaning IDE) interface, which partially eliminates the "save cost by using existing equipment" idea: brand new mini-ITX mainboard with CPU costs less than 100 USD; The DOS-based control PC in my waterjet machine had a HDD interface that was not even IDE, but something even older, no idea, how to replace it, if it failed (I still have the backup of the contents of that HDD); 2) using 5+ years old equipment (I am sure that newer PCs are LinuxCNC capable) in industrial environment, poses increased failure risk, which is unacceptable for a CNC machine controller, safety comes first, a possible save of 100 USD should come afterwards. The failure of the control PC (PSU burned down and damaged something else) in my waterjet machine was one of the reasons I was forced to retrofit that machine to something else (meaning - LinuxCNC), because there was no way to replace those parts at a reasonable cost, but the old system did not work, when I managed to copy all the contents of DOS HDD to another PC and swapped the servo motion control card (it was not an easy task to find a working PC with ISA slot); 3) using legacy OS also hurts the efficiency (which also hurts environment in a way) - for me transfering files to the DOS-controlled waterjet machine was real PIA due to lack of support to modern technologies: a) my CAM application was working only on win_xp, I could not use any other CAM application as the machine did not accept g-code, the code was written in a specific, human non-readable form; b) I found out that only Virtual PC application allowed shared folders for DOS guest OS, even more - I found out that Virtual PC application had to run on Windows 2000 or earlier to support shared folders for DOS as guest OS; c) so the usual path to create a file for machine was: -- start PC in win_xp, create file and save; -- restart to win 2000, start virtual machine with DOS; -- restart waterjet machine to create telnet connection with the PC; -- copy the file; -- restart the waterjet machine so that it runs the CNC control application; Now guess what happened if I discovered a small mistake in the code (like starting point not set correctly)? Going through all of those steps took more than 5 minutes instead of simply editing a file and changing 2 or 3 numbers... Just as Mark wrote, even win95/win98 is out of use these days because there are no drivers for the hardware that is less than 10 years old. I have 3 PCs in my room waiting for a day to run LinuxCNC in my own machines, because they are not even close to be capable of running SolidEdge, but having 2+ GHz CPU gives them enough power to handle Ubuntu and LinuxCNC. For my clients' machines I will use only brand-new components (and I hope that I do not have to explain, why). Viesturs ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Virtualization & Cloud Management Using Capacity Planning Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing also focuses on allowing computing to be delivered as a service. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51521223/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
