CNC daydreaming

[dkemppai]

I believe both are factors, personal chemistry and pain levels, in opiod addiction. I don’t even care for more than a very rate one drink of alcohol as far as brain fog. But when I my world collapsed to nothing but pain on puking on Friday, I was hsppy to get dilaudid.

When in need, no arguments from me! Wasn't saying opiods don't have their place. They certainly do. The point was that some people are more prone to addiction than others. That in itself warrants care when prescribing and/or after prescription.

I have a hard time with wanting to eat sugary things. That's just a macro nutrient but it's something I have to watch. Others I know don't like sweets, but to me that's the most foreign concept. Sugar and machine tools are the closest thing I have to an addiction, so am really speaking without personal experience. I only have a general knowledge that it can happen.

Glad to see you getting back on line. Might be time to order on of those KFLOP boards, eh?

 

[rabler]

When in need, no arguments from me! Wasn't saying opiods don't have their place. They certainly do. The point was that some people are more prone to addiction than others. That in itself warrants care when prescribing and/or after prescription.

I have a hard time with wanting to eat sugary things. That's just a macro nutrient but it's something I have to watch. Others I know don't like sweets, but to me that's the most foreign concept. Sugar and machine tools are the closest thing I have to an addiction, so am really speaking without personal experience. I only have a general knowledge that it can happen.

Glad to see you getting back on line. Might be time to order on of those KFLOP boards, eh?

I have a sweet tooth too. But with my dietary issues I don't get a lot of processed foods, fat or sugar. Unfortunately that doesn't mean that I have the classic toothpick figure of a long-term Crohn's sufferer.

The Mesa boards are in the mail and due to arrive Wednesday. Did spend some time while in the hospital looking at pictures and thinking about tackling the gut and rewire. This week I will probably also order a scale for the cross slide on the big Monarch so I can put a DRO on that.

 

[rabler]

Mesa cards arrived. Clockwise starting at the top left
1) Digital I/O board, buffered and isolated, 5-32V IIRC
2) Analog servo board
3) Encoder inputs and breakout to 1) and 2)
4) Ethernet interface and master FPGA.

The bottom two boards plug together with the M/F DB-25 connectors. Just need to pull out the mounting screws on one side.

Typical ball point pen in the center for scale.

I may get another digital I/O board for the "front panel", that would allow MPG inputs and few other knobs/buttons, although LinuxCNC has quite a rich collection of mouse driven GUI's so don't need too many.

 

[dkemppai]

Nice looking layouts on those boards. Ceramic and Tantalum caps for long life. Only minor weirdness is the multiple rows of connectors. That might be a little tight during install, but it shrinks the layout a lot!

I'm really interested in seeing how your build progresses.

 

[rabler]

Ordered one more of the little cards from Mesa. Decided I wanted to put the higher voltage relay/contactor outputs on a stand alone card just for noise isolation. They have an 48 output only relay driver card with short circuit, flyback protection and galvanic isolation from the logic side.

 

[rabler]

What a rat's nest of wires! This will need to get completely redone but I'm being methodical about taking things apart so I can map things out to some extent. I'm going to leave this for now and completely gut the front console which actually has a CRT tube based monitor. Remember those?


With help from my wife (who is also a retired EE) we got the old PC controller removed. This leaves a 20" x 20" panel area that I can use to mount my new controller electroncs. The fanout board on the right side of that area will also get removed so there is additional space once I get started, but I left it there for indexing and wiring for now.


I'm thinking I'll need a good wire label maker. Any suggestions for brands/models?

 

[BGHansen]

I have one of these Brother label makers and use the heck out of it.

Bruce

I've only used the 12mm wide tapes though it is advertised as working with 9, 6 and 3.5 mm ones also (can't vouch for those).

 

[Boswell]

+1 on Brother PTouch line of label makers

I have two of these (PT2430 PC). One in the shop and one in my home office. this model only works connected to a PC. Brother has a free app that you can use to create and save labels and label templates. Looks like these are getting somewhat pricy but like Bruce, I use the heck out of it.

 

[rabler]

I have one of these Brother label makers and use the heck out of it.

I have a couple of those myself, I think both are more than 10 years old and still going strong. I made some labels that are poorly slapped on some of the dangling data cables in the second picture. I think there are either special labelers or special tapes that can be used to make more permanent, closely wrapped sleeves rather than "flags" that tend to get messed up in concentrated wiring situation??

 

[rabler]

Off to a grand start of messing with LinuxCNC.
The joys of opensource software ... ​

I dropped Linuxcnc 2.8.4 (the current stable release or something like that) onto a USB stick and installed it on my brand-spankin' new ASRock Industrial 4x4 BOX-5600U mini-PC. Really an overkill machine vs what is needed for cnc, but I wanted something that would run CAD, or anything else that suited my fancy, not just an RPI. And I wanted dual NIC capability since I'm using an ethernet based Mesa card for hardware interface. Throw in a healthy dose of DRAM and a large SSD for good measure. And a touchscreen monitor.

TL;DR Well, all that new-fangle bit me in the ass ...
I'll go make some metal chips for a while before messing more with the silicon type chips.


LinuxCNC 2.8.4 is a complete linux install with linuxcnc bundled in. This is because linuxcnc requires an RT (realtime) kernel, so having a bundled install avoids the step of separately downloading and installing an RT kernel, and then being sure the necessary kernel modules match the kernel build.

Well, my install went OK but bootup stalled at a blank screen. Had to dig through my old linux skills
- edit the grub boot menu to pull out "quiet"
- Alt-F1 to get a terminal
- systemctl status to see lightdm (displaymanager) had failed to start
- traced lightdm's problems to Xserver failing
- some digging through kernel modules shows that the AMD GPU drivers for the older debian kernel for 2.8.4 don't support the newer cpu's.

Looks like the answer may be to use LinuxCNC 2.9 (pre-release) on Linux Mint. 2.9 is in the debian distro, so it can be installed directly via apt-get commands. In theory, but that'll be another day. But I do like the idea of a Mint-based machine, consistent with what I'm using elsewhere.