I've often thought about it, but the extended config puts me off a bit as I don't know a great deal about CNC controllers yet. Is it worth the config? i am using TurboCNC at the moment, and although the software is good for my present use, I would be looking to upgrade in the future.

Hi Kong,

Have you looked at the EMC site?
http://www.linuxcnc.org/
From what I have read (I am not a user) it is the Real Time Linux install that is the hard part. Though that has been made easier through the "Brain Dead Install" disks that are available.
I'm interested also but am going to hold off until I get my CNC machine running on DOS first.

Chris

I have downloaded the bdi from a link on linuxcnc.org and installed it. It only took 4 differant hardware changes to get it installed. Ended up with 450mhz pentium w/s3 video card. It installs a realtime linux install with the emc software. The interface is a windows like gui.

I am not a unix person so I am stumbling around. How the heck do I change the screen resolution? The emc simutator seems to work but I can not get any of the premade ini files to work. The splash screen comes up then quits. neither the ini file running stepmod.o or freqmod.o work. More reading.

I am using turbocnc too(awsome program). I wanted to try this to see how it performs. I think it has constant velocity conturing. It is the main reason that I want to play with it.

sam

Hi Samco,
I don't mean to change the subject here but what is "Constant velocity contouring"? Maybe you could post an explanation in http://www.cnczone.com/articles.php?action=viewcat&catid=12 ?
Thanks

Samco, I would appreciate it if you could do a bit of a review when you get the hang of it. As for the resolution, not sure on the "real time linux" distro, but I have some experience of Mandrake Linux, which used the X-Windows system for screen management. In Mandrake, yoiu could edit the file
/etc/X11/XFree86.conf to set it up for your grafx card, resolution, mouse resolution, keyboard, etc. You will then need to re-start the x-windows to take effect. Some distro's have their own screen managers however, so you may want to check on google - you need any more Linux help, give me a shout.

Time is the problem. It looks like it is some form of x-windows. I spent some of yesterday looking though config files to get familiar with it. Still can't change the resolution. Still looking. Also still only works using emc simulator icon.


This was taken from an ad on cncmotion.com. Don't think I can say it any better.
"LOOK AHEAD CONSTANT VELOCITY CONTOURING ON ALL AXIS ALLOWS TOOLPATHS TO BE CREATED MORE QUICKLY AND EFFICIENTLY BY ANALYZING THE TRAJECTORY OF THE NEXT LINE AND ADJUSTING THE TRANSITION SPEED INSTEAD OF RAMPING UP AND DOWN FOR EVERY LINE IN THE CAD PROGRAM"


Turbocnc is suposed to have it in its next version. I can't wait.

sam

Ok samco, I feel this would be easier with two of us working on it, so I will download and install it tonight. i checked the BrainDead linux webby and it says it includes XFree86 x-windows in the updates directory on the CD. So, in theory you will need to edit the XFree86.conf file as I posted earlier. Your current user may not have priveledges to view this folder, so at the command line, type "su" to change to root user, which has all priveledges, and will allow you to cd into the /etc/X11/ directory. Alternatively, there may be some info on the CD.

edit - just curious, which version of the BDI did you get? Looks like the smaller ones are gonna be for machines just running the EMC, whereas the RedHat distro will be a full version of Linux and all it's goodies. I'm gonna try the smallest one first (rc14) then upgrade that to RedHat once I have it figured out, simply for the networking support and security.
re-edit - scrap that, I found the older Redhat 6.2 on penguincnc.org and I am presently downloading it - 550MB.

I downloaded the bdi 2.20b iso from Penguin CNC. It was about 500 and some megs. It BDI-Live_rc14 sounds like it boots emc from a cd(no hardrive required unless you want to store files. Didn't look at that.

sam

I downloaded that bdi 2.2b last night, and have spent about 4 hours trying to install it today. It's just not having it, I think it's due to my on-board grafx as it mentions that could cause problems on their webby. Anyhow, I am determined to get this software running now, so i am currently installing an old red-hat 7, and I will then attempt to patch the kernel into real-mode. i have a long night ahead of me! How you getting on Samco?

I haven't made it back to the project yet. Hopefully this weekend I will get some time to work on it again. I have some stepper motors hooked to some parker drives that I can hook up to play with once I get the EMC working.

You know the install is going well if the install is a gui interface and not text. That means it Recognized your video card.

sam

Edit - Chip sweeper? my god I have been machining sense before highschool. ;)

Keep posting, you will be a master machinist in no time...:)

Eric

Originally posted by samco
I haven't made it back to the project yet. Hopefully this weekend I will get some time to work on it again. I have some stepper motors hooked to some parker drives that I can hook up to play with once I get the EMC working.

You know the install is going well if the install is a gui interface and not text. That means it Recognized your video card.

sam

Edit - Chip sweeper? my god I have been machining sense before highschool. ;)

Partial success! I have spent 3 days now on it, and have just got everything installed. I have a full Redhat 7.0 installation with real-time kernel, and have just got emc itself installed and almost running. Now I need to edit the ini file to set it up for my machine and I should be off. However, this is the part i was dreading TBH, so I'll report back in a couple of days once I get some well earned sleep!

Kong,

Is there a linux emulator so I can try the software in dos?

Eric

No Balsaman, but apparently DeskNcrt (http://deskam.com/deskncrt.html) is based on it, and it's free. Unfortunatley it is all your fault that I have not posted here in a while. I got the thing up and running, but not yet configured, so not yet working on my machine. You see, since reading about your new CNC router, I have started planning one, and it is taking up all my spare time!! Anyhow, from what i have read about the abilities of EMC, such as constant velocity contouring, and twin parallel port support, etc, I believe it would be a lot more efficient/faster than good old turboCNC. There is a mailing list over here (http://emc.sourceforge.net/NIST-archive/threads.html) which may be of some use, but it is rather old, and the archive is HUGE!! Or, better still, I just remembered, there is a new "Brain dead install" which will run on top of DOS (or windows, I forget), straight off of the CD. You can have a read over here (http://www.linuxcnc.org/bdi/). It is well worth trying, but if the BDI doesn't work, expect to put in about 24+ Hours trying to get the original version to work!

Hi,

I'm considering upgrading my desk computer to a faster machine. If so that will leave me with an "Asus" 650 mhz P3 motherboard. I was thinking that I could turn that into a linux box to run EMC. What periferals should I add or stay away from?
My other problem is that I know very little about Unix/Linux commands and procedures. Also little about Linux installation.
Are there any good books that might be able to help me that you guys know of?

Chris

As for the software, I tried a lot of different combinations, but only had complete success using RedHat 6.2, with a 2.2.13 kernel (from www.kernel.org), RTLinux 2.0 and emc version - damn it I can't remember off hand, but I will find out if you get that far(it's on a seperate hard disk, so I'll need to swap them, which is a pain right now), but I think it was 1.17.
Of course, you could always try one of the BDI installs which I mentioned earlier. As for hardware, well Linux isn't as bad as people make out, and the GUI is very similar to windows. The installation will give you loads of text docs to read if you want for the basic commands, but if you have a quick google for linux tutorials it may turn up some good stuff. Best thing to do is to download the above (redhat 6.2 only requires one disk, although three are available for sources and docs), and have a go. Have a read through the Linux CNC handbook (http://emc.sourceforge.net/Handbook/index.html) at the installation pages, don't be too put off, there are plenty of guides out there. If you get stuck, post here and I'll try to help.

Thank you Kong.
I have tried reading some of the tutorials already. I get lost in some of the obscure words and parameters used in the commands. I just don't know what they mean which is why I want to find a book.
I am in the tradeshow business and in fact today I am going to take out The Linuxworld show in San Fransisco. There is a booth there for "O'Riley Publications" and I am going to buy the book "Linux In a Nutshell" from them.

Chris

You are talking about the console. When you become experienced, you will find the console and it's commands are quicker and more powerful than the GUI (graphical user interface, ie linux version of windows). But you don't have to use the console. The installation should ask you if you want to do a "graphical login", which will bypass this and go straight to GUI. It is simple in there. However, if you get stuck in the console, you can type the name of the command, followed by --help and you will usually get a list of parameters and examples how to use them. Some commands are similar to dos, such as "cd" to change directory. I just found some nice tutorials over here (http://www.tuxfiles.org/). Just give it a go, you'll like it!

Yea, plain English tutorials. I'll give them a read and let you know what I think.

Thanks,
Chris

I dont have my machine yet so i dont know how the software will work for real cnc jobs. But so far the 'install' was really easy, the easiest way is to get the BDI boot cd. All you do is burn it stick it in and boot. That's it as far as the OS/EMC install.
http://www.linuxcnc.org/bdi/

Personally i think that i'm going to go with the boot cd option (even thou the latest versions are supposed to have a 'install to harddisk" option) simply because it will be really easy to upgrade to a newer version when it comes out. Just burn a new cd, reboot and if it doesnt work you pop the old cd back in and everything is fine.

The software has a backplot and i ran some sample gcode programs just having the steppers hooked up thru a stepperworld.com board. It worked fine after i figured out how to configure the software. The configuration was confusing at first (actually it still is pretty confusing). But after a hour or so of support from the developers i got the steppers running nice and smooth.

The support was great. If you are having problems configuring it don't give up. Check out #emc on irc.freenode.net and im sure they will be happy to help you too.

The minimum specs are fairly forgiving, the only problem is that some videocards are not supported.

Minimum specs : Pentium class 400MHz CPU or higher with at least 128Mb RAM. A CDROM drive that is set for bootable CDs in the BIOS. No hard drive is required !

Over all it looks nice, i'll report more once i've actually used it in production :)

That's great that you got it to work, I had all sorts of problems with the BDI. So does it give you a complete linux system, with access to the networking tools, text editors, etc, or is it just the EMC? The one concern I had about running off the CD is that my settings and saved files would be lost once you power down the PC. I guess it uses a small windows/dos file to store these settings?

Originally posted by kong
That's great that you got it to work, I had all sorts of problems with the BDI. So does it give you a complete linux system, with access to the networking tools, text editors, etc, or is it just the EMC? The one concern I had about running off the CD is that my settings and saved files would be lost once you power down the PC. I guess it uses a small windows/dos file to store these settings?

It's a little limited as far as the programs it includes. But it does give you network access, it has some editors with it and i believe it has a webbrowser.

The boot cd is supposed to have a option to save your configuration on a harddrive or floppy. I haven't tried that yet. I'm not sure how it does that, it may want to format the harddrive with a linux partition, im not sure.

If the boot cd doesnt work you can try the Redhat 6.2 based BDI cd:
http://emc.obstinate.org/BDI-2.20b.iso

I believe that its a modified install disk that goes thru the redhat 6.2 install but when its done you have a realtime kernel and emc is also installed. Thats how the BDI TNG worked (redhat 7.2 based) but i talked to the developer and he said that he has stopped the development of BDI TNG and is only working on the live cd and the 2.xx versions.

Someone else asked about the screen resolution in X, one quick thing that you can try is to hit CTRL+ALT+- (Control+Alt+Keypad minus). That's the shortcut key to change resolution, it wont save any changes but it will change the current session.

Still haven't tried it with a machine but i've been looking at how it behaves standalone (just having the steppers hooked up without any load on them).

I can see that it is keeping a constant speed when you draw a diagonal line in all three axis at the same time, i've not researched circles or multiple line segments to see if it slows down at the start of every line yet.

Linux emc work great. I've only done some simple lines and circles so far but everything looks great.

The BDI live cd really makes it easy to get it up and running. I'm still thinking about doing a actuall install on the harddrive to make it a little more flexible as far as the software i want on there. (Mainly im looking for samba, nfs, etc. to transfer my programs to the linux box)

If I am in windows using Netscape or Internet Explorer how do I make a boot cd? Do I download the BDI files and burn the cd directly. I am a little new to this CD burner we have so I will look at that also.

Thanks,
Chris

Save the file to your computer, as an *iso. (this is a cd image, ie, it contains the details of the layout of the directories as they will put onto the disk). You can then use Nero, or your chosen cd-burner software to "burn image", then tell the software the location of the iso image you just downloaded, and you're good to go. It will burn like a normal cd, and the file structure and files will automatically extracted from the image and put on the cd.
Just make sure you use the "burn image" option, and don't burn the iso to the cd the normal way.

some time has past since any activity on this section.
how is use of emc going to date.
I dl'd the latest morphix emc-bdi live disk and am wondering what your using to generate the g-code

Originally posted by Jan
some time has past since any activity on this section.
how is use of emc going to date.


I've been using EMC for a while now and it's been working great. I just recently got my machine up to a speed of 55 ipm and everything is still running just fine in EMC. I'm getting ready to try to configure the velocity limits to different amounts on different axis, but im not forseeing any problems.

Has anybody figured out how to zero only one of the axis in the latest EMC?

Hmmm, I'm having some difficulty in running g-codes accurately. I am using metric system, and have just read there are some problems metric EMC. i am just downloading th current BDI rc23 to see if I can get it to install, but is anyone else using metric?

kong, you may want to take a look at :
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=33140
this is the emc-user email archive,there was considerable amount of emails this morning about someone changing to metric, since I don't have my system setup yet, I deleted those emails.
a quick check at the above site only shows emails archived upto Nov, but they should be available somewhere.
jerry

I half heartedly made an attemp to install EMC, but bombed out at the thought of downloading such a big BDI file. I would be interested to see a screen capture of the EMC operating panel though. Does Linux do screen capture or is that a 3 day install too?

From my experiences with EMC, it si really not worth the trouble - unless you are handy with Linux, or are on a strict budget. i ended up buying Mach2 - since it is EMC based, and the support is fantastic.

Originally posted by ynneb
I half heartedly made an attemp to install EMC, but bombed out at the thought of downloading such a big BDI file. I would be interested to see a screen capture of the EMC operating panel though. Does Linux do screen capture or is that a 3 day install too?

Sorry for the quality of the movie, but it was taken with my digital camera..

http://ullberg.us/cnc/new/cnc/emc/emc.avi

Top left has the current coordinates
Top right has the backplot
Bottom Right has the code
Plus there are various controls

I just tried to download any ISO from http://www.sherline.com/emc/
\but i couldn´t.

Anyone could send me a link from BDI-EMC v4.14 [2.1.05] [657MB] - BDI-EMC v4.14 - Debian based ?????

Thanks guys!

I just tried to download any ISO from http://www.sherline.com/emc/
\but i couldn´t.

Anyone could send me a link from BDI-EMC v4.14 [2.1.05] [657MB] - BDI-EMC v4.14 - Debian based ?????

Thanks guys!

Try one of these:

http://www.linuxcnc.org/bdi/

http://cimweb.cim.fh-aalen.de/emc/
http://dsplabs.utt.ro/~juve/emc/
http://www.wildrice.com/emc/
http://www.cncgear.com/EMC/BDI/

Nice one, Ullbergm ! thanks a lot! I saw your videos, wow!Nice machine.

Linux is really awsome. I´m using TurboCNC, but Debian with CNC is the bes way to use a PC. As a CNC controler i cant say, because i´m still "training" my first baby.

I know that some boards are not compatible with EMC. Why this ocurs?

Hello guys, there is any problem if I use a DIscrete board (From PHILs site) in EMC ?
Thanks guys