What's the Oddest Machine You Have Powered with LinuxCNC

Wow!!!

It is used for decorative wood carving (signs, plaques...). Carving 8 pieces at a time. Originally it only had a single Z axis. with a hand screw for fine adjustment of each spindle height. This was difficult to maintain and adjust the Z depth between each spindle for varying material thicknesses or when changing tools. So I recently rebuilt the machine with a separate closed loop stepper motor, ball screw and linear guides on each spindle. I also replaced the old single servo, 12ft torque tube, rack and pinion drive system for the Y axis with new larger linear ways, two ball screws and 2 servos. Then after doing all of that work I found out that the majority of the slop in the old system wasn't due to compliance in the old drive train, but fex in the bridge. So I stiffened the bridge, and it is greatly improved. (The X also got new ways, and replaced a belt driven lead screw with a direct drive ball screw and added tool touch probe and probing routine.)

Coincidentally that machine was also the very first machine I ever setup/retrofitted to run Linuxcnc (EMC2 at the time) and it has been running it the longest. But back then it started out as a simple 3 axis control with 3 step/dir commanded servos using software stepgens and no control of the VFDs. (The operator had to manually start/stop the spindles/VFDs.)

Then few years later I added a Mesa 5i25/7i85S combo, to add encoder feedback to close the position loop in Linuxcnc and fast hardware step-generation. Soon after that I used Mb2hal, to add control of the 8 spindle VFDs to Linuxcnc.

I have nearly a 20yr history with this machine since we bought it new, with more than half of those years running EMC2/Linuxcnc.

I wanna ask a question. What are you using as controller?(SBC or normal computer). Since i didn't setup a machine with normal computer, i am wondering about this topic. I usually worked with SBCs, so i didn't use parallel port or that kind of stuff. Is it hard, what do you think?

That's impressive, do you use it for a business? And what do you do for CAD/CAM?

It uses a normal PC. (All I've ever tried.) The original PC was an older Pentium D that was unusual because it had both ISA and PCI slots. The machine's original DOS PC control (that was taken out by a lightning strike) used an ISA card with 32 ttl inputs and 32 outs to control the machine. We tried to replicate the old DOS pc control but we were never able to get the new pc to work correctly with the old software's security keys and the software's manufacturer had dropped support and moved on to WinCNC. So with the help of Andy Pugh who very kindly wrote a Linuxcnc driver for the old ISA io card, I started my journey with Linuxcnc and was able to get the machine running without any changes in hardware.

The Linuxcnc driver for the old ISA card worked like a giant parallel port, and used software stepgen, and worked ok and was at least equivalent to the old DOS control. But Linuxcnc was far more adaptable...

Unfortunately I was never able to get a version of Linux newer than Ubuntu 10.4 to work with Linuxcnc on that old ISA PC (I suspect that kernel support for the ISA was disabled for the later pre-compiled real time kernels.) So in order to move on and upgrade the machine to Linuxcnc v2.9 (needed for the extra joint support) I had to replace the old PC and ISA card with new Mesa hardware. I already had a 5i25 and 7i85S in the old pc but I needed to add a 7i84 for GPIO and a 7i88 for the 7 additional stepgens. The "new" computer is some random i5 PC pulled out of our IT department's closet of spare cast offs (a Linovo I think).