emc2 in industrial use

[shafagh]

are emc2's supported pci boards, like motenc and mesa cards, really good for industrial uses? what I mean is, can I expect them to work for long times? how much should I expect them (not just time, but everything)? Isn't it better to pay for a ready-to-use controller from some big company? i don't have any problem with making things myself.

which brand is better? for example a m5I22 of mesanet or some Corresponding board from motenc or other brands?

any information will be appreciated

[chester88]

Well If you want you can pay Mesa aprox 20% to build the boards with industrial temp ranges.
I don't know about Motenc Its not used much with EMC but I'm sure they are reliable.
I've not heard of reports of reliability problems with Mesa or Pico (the two most used)

As for what is better EMC or big company controller that really depends on you and your money.

Big company (lets say Fanuc) is
- turnkey (you tell them what you need)
- common lots of machine use it
- expensive software and hardware.
- closed source (you can't fix it or change it)

EMC is
- not turnkey (you have to configure it to do what you want)
- not as common there isn't a million machines running it.
- is free of purchase cost. it costs you your time. There is hardware costs.
- it is open sourced ( fix, change, understand it or pay someone to do it )

EMC is being used on large industrial machines using both Mesa and Pico boards
What are you trying to do with them?

[shafagh]

thanks chester,
By industrial mostly I mean longtime use and hard serious works.
and going to use them for 4&5 axis milling and want them to be at least nearly good as what a Fanuc will be.

[chester88]

EMC Documentation Wiki: Videos

YouTube - EMC2 cinci test cut

[shafagh]

thanks man

[unterhaus]

I don't see why it wouldn't be. Just because a commercial control has proprietary electronics doesn't mean there is anything better about it. I look inside the control cabinets of every CNC I get a chance to, and none of them are that impressive. Most everyone ends up using industrial motor drives, and that's really where you need a robust setup.

I was just looking at the guts of the machine we use here at work. It has a windows interface, so it needs a smart coprocessor to actually do the motion. Turns out it uses a PMAC card. It has a common PC built into the cabinet. Looks ok from the outside, but the inside is a bit of a hack job. There are a batch of ribbon cables running through an open expansion slot space to a batch of breakout boards. The breakout boards have a cover over them, but otherwise it doesn't look any better or more robust than any EMC servo installation I've seen.

[shafagh]

yeah, you're correct, but there is also another software you might heard of, reprap, that used for rapidprototyping. it also controls a bunch of stepper motors, but you can't compare it with emc motion controlling.
I was just guessing that may be the same applies to emc2 and those big guys.

thanks for replying anyway.

[jmelson]

Originally Posted by shafagh are emc2's supported pci boards, like motenc and mesa cards, really good for industrial uses? what I mean is, can I expect them to work for long times? how much should I expect them (not just time, but everything)? Isn't it better to pay for a ready-to-use controller from some big company? i don't have any problem with making things myself.

I have been using some of my own (Pico Systems) boards since 1998 or so on my Bridgeport. I have several customers that have been using these boards since about 2002. MPM in Wichita has been using our PPMC boards on several VERY large machines since about 2006.

These are not PCI boards, but plug into the PC parallel port. This sometimes makes computer upgrades easier, and now the PCI slot is being superseded by PCIe.

I generally design electronics to last a minimum of 20 years, and have a number of things I have built that are approaching 40 years of age, and still working fine.

Jon

[Al_The_Man]

Originally Posted by shafagh thanks chester, By industrial mostly I mean longtime use and hard serious works. and going to use them for 4&5 axis milling and want them to be at least nearly good as what a Fanuc will be.

Over the past 30yrs I have installed commercial systems, Fanuc, Mitsubishi etc as well as PC based systems using regular off the shelf MB's built in to the enclosure and using motion cards such as Galil and Acroloop.
I have seen no difference in reliability between the two types, in spite of some of the most rigorous environments out there.
The difference you are probably going to see is in the features, although these are now becoming closer, and the time taken for integration, with the PC based usually taking longer.
Al.

[cnc-it]

One thing I notice on Fanuc controls is they use gold plated pins on connectors..in a damp environment this makes a big difference ... costs a lot more to produce boards like this but other parts I have ie. a contraves spindle drive don't have this and I have to pull the plugs and clean the pins every now and then to stop faults occuring. My controls are 1984/5 still going strong.

John

[davidmb]

I run a 1m x 600cm diy router under EMC2 on a PC via PCI parallel cards ( I bought a ten of these so I have plenty of spares, cost about £7 each two years ago ), I changed the PC to use compact flash instead of hard disk, so the only moving part within the PC is the fans on the chip cooler and PSU. I routinely run jobs that take 4 to 5 hours at a go and have had no problems at all for the last two years. ( I should really strip down the controlling PC every couple of hundred hours of runtime - but I haven't got around to that yet :-o ).

What really makes commercial kit so reliable is the service that you get from the vendor albeit at a cost, if a manufacturer finds a fault that is related to a particular component/batch they would trace all other similar components in the same batch and look to replace them asap or at the next service. Most diy'ers would generally only replace components when bust or during an upgrade ( because diy'ers are also on very tight budgets more compromises on components would be made - also build quality is subjective to the individual doing the building ).

So there are quite a few factors that need to be considered when comparing reliability of DIY / Commercial kit, and it is not purely down to just the components. In addition how you use the equipment also has a factor.

[svenakela]

There are a bunch of companies out there using LinuxCNC for industrial machines retrofits. That's not worse than buying an old machine with a legacy system that isn't supported anyway.