That is definitely true, I think. Also, I think that RTOS is sort of a
left-over from a few decades ago, because back then ther were no
other options. Nowadays it still has a place, although of course there
are different way more sophisticated solutions.
That pretty much works the same is in HPC, most will opt for low cost
or one step up from that for personal and business solutions.
No one has a need, nor can afford computers that cost hundreds of
millions, so why should they use networking technology, or filesystems,
that cost tens of
millions., sure it' much faster but no one with a pc or even a few Dell
servers/cluster had a need for that.
I know I saw linux-cnc years ago, when I was first trying some CNC
stuff, but got sidetracked for a year or 10. Some version was already
around, although I messed a bit with turbocnc (which is still around in
some sort of form I saw).
What I think is a plus, if you don't need to go to extremes, is that
linux-cnc comes in a complete OS with application distribution, you
install it and everything is there.
As for extremes, and I work in 'extremes' when it comes to computing,
nothing of the shelf will really ever work. If You have a CNC machine,
that was invested many millions in, it's not an issue to drop hundreds
of k's in hardware to run it, but there will be very few that do, or
want to do, that even.
my 2 cts
Ron
On 1/23/20 7:33 AM, Les Newell wrote:
PCs are cheap, easily available and easy to code on. They provide huge
amounts of processing power for little money and are very well suited
to GUI applications. However they are not designed for hard real time
work. LinuxCNC does a good job but even then it tends to be a bit
touchy if not paired with some form of control hardware to take over
the really tight timing. Mesa's FPGA cards are a good example. I do a
fair amount of repair an maintenance on a variety of CNC machines. The
majority of them go the same route and use a PC for the front end and
some sort of custom hardware or PLC for motion control.
How complicated does your controller have to be? Mesa's FPGA boards
for example are pretty dumb and need feeding every 1ms, which LinuxCNC
handles quite easily on most PC hardware. How much do you gain by
moving more of the motion control to external hardware?
Les
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