LinuxCNC vs Commercial

DuNuNuBatman wrote:

Yeah, probably not for this one. I'm probably going with Todd's recommendation of starting with an older used machine and possibly updating the controls if necessary. I'll look at doing a build once I'm more familiar with it and already have something in place.

Updating the controls can be a major undertaking if you haven't done this before. If your shop needs to be OSHA compliant then you need to come up to speed as far at the latest safety requirements. Even if it isn't a shop under OSHA oversight you still want to consider building the controls in a way that is compliant. Dust removal is another big factor in safety and something that justifies an enclosed machine to help contain dust and swarf.

wizard69 wrote:

DuNuNuBatman wrote:

Yeah, probably not for this one. I'm probably going with Todd's recommendation of starting with an older used machine and possibly updating the controls if necessary. I'll look at doing a build once I'm more familiar with it and already have something in place.

Updating the controls can be a major undertaking if you haven't done this before. If your shop needs to be OSHA compliant then you need to come up to speed as far at the latest safety requirements. Even if it isn't a shop under OSHA oversight you still want to consider building the controls in a way that is compliant. Dust removal is another big factor in safety and something that justifies an enclosed machine to help contain dust and swarf.

It's still orders of magnitude easier than starting from scratch.

i so something interesting on the commercial side. Protection against runways on the controller . That must be an interesting thing .

What makes commercial controllers special? A lot of them seem to run windows which for me would indicate it is a front end to a hardware controller.

At this point, I'm probably going to bail on the diy route and instead get a machine with support. Down time would be more expensive I think...
I'm still very much interested in this on a more personal level. The biggest issue I have all of the controllers is the input. You can either put the gc on a flash drive or if it is really fancy, you can pull it from network storage. One of the main reasons I wanted to use LinuxCNC over Mach was I could write a custom UI that would integrate our existing project software so the employee could select from a project instead of manually selecting the pre-nested code from a file store.