Hi Marcus, Thanks for the insight into the differences. I design hardware and write software for it for a living. Both PC and embedded and lately most of it is Controller Area Network oriented. The machine shop, that I've finally gotten back into after a number of year break, is a place to get away from programming.
My son asked me what I was going to do with the Mill once the CNC conversion was complete. I really didn't have an answer for him since there is no specific project in mind. But for facing an aluminium casting there's nothing more boring than doing it manually. Thank goodness for power feed on the X axis and the Shumatec DRO. So maybe most of the time I'll just want sophisticated power feed? Or once setting an origin, have it do a series of automatic operations. Like setting the BEGIN, END points on my ELS, then setting the depth of cut and pressing START. No need to find an origin. Just touch off and run multiple passes to turn a shoulder to length and diameter. Therapeutic. Not to say that I can't, as I have for the router using Visual CAM, create some sophisticated milling operations. Still. It's early days. The Knee has a stepper motor run with a Gecko and at the moment an ELS to move it up and down. Again just a sophisticated power feed. The Y axis will hopefully be complete this week. Then I can set up the Beagle to run both Z and Y to help manufacture the motor mount for the X and ultimately a second Z for the quill. Anyway, it's late. Enough for tonight. Thanks for putting up with my rambling. John > True. I use both Mach3 and LinuxCNC (on a PC, although I do have a Beaglebone > Black). For a little while I used Mach3 as the go-to software, but I use LinuxCNC > almost exclusively now, simply because I like programming, and I find the > structures available in LinuxCNC to be way, way more capable than in Mach3. I > do use Vectric CAM software, but find I can code lots of operations quite easily > in the editor, as well as tweaking Vectric-generated code more effectively than > running the CAM program again. > > The problem I found with the wizards initially available Mach 3 is that I didn't > like the rather crude approach some of them took to the machining paths. Some > of the plunge cuts seemed rather brutal to me. They also didn't allow the cut to > be finessed in any way - like doing a clearance operation, then climb cutting to > finish; or transitioning from one part of a cut to another in what I would > consider to be an effective way (with intermediate motion to ensure clean start > and finish, or maintain a milling direction). For sure, there are probably much > better routines available now, but by I still find I have much more control in > LinuxCNC. I don't dislike Mach3, and recognise it has some nice features, as well > as being the chosen option by most of our world, but it has not been updated or > supported for a long time now; and I am not familiar with Mach 4. This is all just > my opinion, though. > > I would like to be able to run LinuxCNC on the Beaglebone, but, last time I > looked at MachineKit, it seemed not as well supported by the user group, > forums, or authors, as the support I have found on this list. So I stayed away. > > I use lots of subroutines I simply load and assemble, to make code writing > simple. The O<word> external routines Gene mentions are also quite useful. > > Marcus ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
