Hello - It has been a while since I have been here. I was the one that said there should be an emc forum. But my bdi install at the time never made it to the shop - never hooked to a machine. Not enough time and being a little over my head in linux helped. Plus turbocnc is so easy to hook up and run - and very powerfull. It got to the point though that I needed G64 which turbocnc does not do yet. (constant velocity contouring - or what ever it is called)

Well last week I installed the latest bdi in a 500mhz pentium III computer (BDI-4.30). Painless. It had the shureline mill ini's right on the desktop to play with. I Hooked the computer up to the gantry mill. X and Y have the same setup - input/output scale is 2540. I have the accelleration set to .75 and the max feed at 100ipm for now. It is smooth. I some how managed to frag the ini file - don't know what I did. I changed something and then the x axis would have following errors no matter what I did. I could not see any difference from x and y in the ini file so I just coppied the y section up to the x section and it worked again. Odd.

Z is a different story. This axis has 1000 steps per rev with a 4 to 1 reduction. the lead screws are 10 threads per inch. This makes a input/output scale of 40,000. I think the computer cannot handle that many pulses. I get following errors at anything over about 10 ipm. I am still playing with it though. I may have screwed it up again ;). We have the gearing to chage z to 2 to 1 or maybe 1 to 1 to try.

I am using freqmod in step/direction mode.

Over all I could really get used to emc - very easy to use and seems to have all the bells and whisles I want. I ran some profiles made up of short line segments - very smooth - turbocnc would shake the machine. emc was doing the profile in 1/4 of the time.

thanks
sam

I got 25ipm out of z by changing the period in the ini file from .000022 to .000016. I also geared it from 4:1 to 2:1. I have the stuff to make it 1:1. That should double the feed and is fine for me. I can run both x and y at 200 ipm,

So far I really like emc. I could defenetly get used to it.

thanks
sam

installed emc2 and axis on my bdi 4.3 install. wow - pretty cool. Axis - http://axis.unpy.net/index.cgi/ is a nice user interface for emc2 that allows preview (with zoom in and out and rotate) and backplot (really cool backplot). Now that emc2 has the lerman interp installed (allowing for loops and conditional statements) It does everything I need it to do.

Here is a picture of emc doing a sphire (using a do while loop)
http://www.electronicsam.com/images/KandT/AXIS.JPG

I have been getting a lots of help on the irc channel. the emc2 install is pretty painless on wiki.linuxcnc.org. the people working on developing emc are a great bunch - I want to thank them again for all their hard work.

(I think emc2 is still concidered beta)

sam

good to hear that emc is not too difficult. I have installed bdi on a spare computer but havent played with it much, yet...Emc2 seems much nicer looking.

Sam:

Congratulations. I'm still running EMC and EMC2 in simulation mode---cuz the machine isn'd done---but I hope to catch up soon. The BDI made things, well, brain-dead easy. Note that Paul is now up to BDI-4.38. No need to reinstall; you can upgrade in place. See his notes.

EMC2 is definitely still beta but I think its general release is getting closer. Check the emc-developers and emc-commit lists to see the current flurry of activity.

Regards,
Kent