Upgrade to LinuxCNC - general questions

Hi, I have a small CNC Lathe Machine (Denford Easiturn). It's a very nice little lathe and for the most part HAS been accurate and reliable. It came retro-fitted with Mach3 when I got it. All was good until I started using it more frequently - especially for threading. Things started crashing on a regular basis (within Mach3), to a point where the machine is unreliable e.g. I spend more time resetting tools than I do using it!

The system is basically, stepper motors, a diycnc breakout board, a spindle v4 board - but I also run it through ESS smoothstepper.
Here is a wiring diagram that perfectly depicts my setup (same machine and everything).


I would like to UPGRADE this system to LinuxCNC - I have some experience with Linux - I have several headless servers running at home.

Questions:
1) I have looked at the PC compatibility list, but wondered how current this is? e.g. Would a Dell 745 (these are quite cheap) still be ok to run the latest LinuxCNC version?

2) I notice lots of posts recommending the Mesa 5i25 and 7i76 combination of cards - looking at the diagram will the 7i76 support the 0 - 10v spindle output? Or will I still need to go through the spindle v4 card?

3) Any other parts I would need? (apart from KB, mouse and Monitor).

4) I also notice there seems to be a lot of interfaces for LinuxCNC - recommendations for a simple lathe?

5) Any other recommnedations?

Thank you
Steve

You may be able to run this from a Dell 745 parallel port and your existing breakouts boards.
You might try downloading the LinuxCNC ISO image and testing the latency of the Dell 745
(or similar off-lease PC)

If the Dell has too much latency or you cannot achieve the desired step rate you might consider a 5I25 or 7I92M also in conjunction with your existing breakouts boards.

A 5I25/7I76 is probably overkill unless you need a lot more I/O

Thank you fo the reply - I have already decided on the 5I25/7I76 combination as I do a lot of threading and want the smallest latency I can achieve.

I cannot seem to find information on the 0 - 10v spindle control though - does the 7I25 support this?

thanks again
Steve

Yes the 7I76 has a 0..10V spindle interface

Thank you for the reply!

Quick question regarding the 7i76, this seems to be a board that is married to a 5i25 inside the PC...

Now what about the 7i76E - this seems too have an Ethernet interface. Is this like the Wap9 Ethernet Smoothstepper board in the way that all you need is a network card in your PC to connect it to? Or do you need a special Mesa card in the PC as well?

thanks again
Steve

The 7I76E is a normal Ethernet device so should work with mode host PCs
It does require a different kernel (Preempt-RT) than the normal Debian Wheezy LinuxCNC
distributions RTAI kernel.

For the Mesa Ethernet cards, the easiest way to get both LinuxCNC and the correct OS/kernel is to use
one of the LinuxCNC Debian Stretch test ISO images:

www.linuxcnc.org/testing-stretch-rtpreempt/