Hmm. My comments didn't stand out like I thought they would. I'll highlight them now by removing the '>'
See below.
A few points of clarification:
Again, I have no personal knowledge of FANUC products but I find it very
hard to believe that there are no unsquashed bugs even after years of
usage. I?m curious though: How hard is it to interface you FANUC with a new
touch screen? Or a new Ethernet card? Or transfer programs from a new
version of Windows over the network? Am I stuck with 2010 vintage
hardware that may be hard to service?
PathPilot is essentially a pretty face on LinuxCNC and utilizes all of LinuxCNC
rather than just the HAL. Tormach funded the development of several
additions to LinuxCNC such as a greatly improved trajectory planner and
these are in the fully public version of LinuxCNC. Is the FANUC trajectory
planner perfect? Does it perfectly handle HSM toolpaths? Does Mach3?
PathPilot requires a Mesa 7i92, 5i25 or 6i25. All of these cards are supported
by basic LinuxCNC and cost less than $100 each. Documentation and support
software is available from Mesa without charge. Insofar as I know there is no
relationship between Tormach and Mesa. Certainly I have recently ordered a
7i92 card directly from Mesa with absolutely no indication that I had to be a
Tormach customer
Does bring up an interesting point. The HAL and INI file inside LinuxCNC
define the hardware. There is no real requirement that Path Pilot _needs_
that hardware.
My current experiment does use a MESA product. To be more precise I have
a MACH3 on WIN-XP running through a PMDX-126 Bob driven with either
direct parallel port or a USB Smooth Stepper I borrow from my CNC router.
Or
I have the parallel port or a MESA 7i92H connected into the PMDX-126
running LinuxCNC on the second boot partition. It requires a different HAL
and INI file for each hardware environment but what I'm ultimately trying to
show is that you can dual boot the PC into either OS and not change one bit
of hardware to be running LinuxCNC.
But, a WIN-XP machine with parallel port is tough with DC servos that have
short step pulse delays from WIN-XP while the motor continues to turn,
counting up encoder pulses. That results in a following error and a stop. A
smooth stepper is much better but unfortunately doesn't work with
LinuxCNC. Hence the Ethernet 7i92H connection for LinuxCNC.
John
From: mach1mach2cnc@...
[mailto:mach1mach2cnc@...]
Sent: Monday, September 23, 2019 6:47 PM
To: 'John Dammeyer' johnd@... [mach1mach2cnc]
Subject: RE: [mach1mach2cnc] Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
Fanuc 21 firmware has been out since 2010 ish - any was just a development
due to hardware changes of software/firmware that had been out for many
years. Bugs were eradicated years ago and there has been no need to
improve on it since. If it ain't broke it don't need fixing....
My original reply was LinuxCNC related.
Pathpilot is a commercial Tormach product and is also neither Mach3 or
LinuxCNC. It is a Linux based system, as are Fanuc controllers.
Pathpilot was developed because neither Mach3 or LinuxCNC did what
Tormach wanted, so they took the open source HAL from LinuxCNC as a basis
for their own work. To counteract any licencing issues they had to release
their software but cleverly limited it to some custom Mesa style boards made
specifically for themselves.. I seem to remember they also bought out the
company that made the boards to protect against clones.
Steve Blackmore
On 23/09/2019 21:42:22, 'Ken Strauss' ken.strauss@...
[mach1mach2cnc] <mach1mach2cnc@...> wrote:
I have no experience with Fanuc 21 controllers but I?ve never encountered
any bug free software after over fifty years of computer usage.
Congratulations!
I?m sure that you understand why Tormach doesn?t exactly make an effort
to ensure that you can use their free software on non-Tormach machines.
On the other hand PathPilot runs on most any reasonably modern cheap PC
and touch screen with no need to find an XT machine with a parallel port.
BTW, the original question was regarding Mach3 and LinuxCNC rather than
Fanuc controllers.
From: mach1mach2cnc@...
[mailto:mach1mach2cnc@...]
Sent: Monday, September 23, 2019 4:32 PM
To: 'John Dammeyer' johnd@... [mach1mach2cnc]
Subject: RE: [mach1mach2cnc] Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
John Stevenson and I did look at Pathpilot when it first came out.. At the
same time we obtained a couple of stand alone panel mounted clone Fanuc
21 style lathe controllers. It took me little longer than a week to get one of
the clone controls wired and working fully closed loop. It's still working now,
never needed any bugs fixing as it didn't have any. It has the great advantage
of NOT using pc hardware or cluttering the shop with a keyboard or mouse.
Pathpilot looks very pretty but was an utter bastard to get it to work with non
tormach hardware and we never fully sorted it. It was quickly abandoned to
the trash and forgotten about until now.
As Dan noted - quite easy to piss off the Linux guru's - any criticism is taken as
if you called their mother or granny a whore LOL
Steve Blackmore
On 22/09/2019 18:09:02, 'Ken Strauss' ken.strauss@...
[mach1mach2cnc] <mach1mach2cnc@...> wrote:
I used Mach3 for several years on my Tormach PCNC770. When Tormach
released PathPilot (which is mostly LinuxCNC) 3 years ago I converted. There
is absolutely no comparison between the two types of control software..
LinuxCNC hasn?t crashed or randomly done funny things over the last 3
years, the user interface is very attractive with clean elements instead of the
gaudy default colours of Mach3, touch screen operation is a delight, the tool
table works reliably, soft limits work, I can transfer files to my machine over
Ethernet and even surf the net while running a job, the GCode dialect
supports named variables and conditional execution which is great for hand
written code but most importantly bugs are fixed with updated releases
several times a year rather than being ignored. In summary, I would even
consider going back to Mach3.
From: mach1mach2cnc@...
[mailto:mach1mach2cnc@...]
Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2019 12:32 PM
To: 'John Dammeyer' johnd@... [mach1mach2cnc]
Subject: Re: [mach1mach2cnc] Returning to MACH3/4 from LinuxCNC
Hi John - It's some years ago now but I gave it a good test but gave up. I'm
not a programmer or software developer or any other sort of guru so failed
to get it to work reliably. Unless you know Linux really well - forget it.. It
seems to have been written by some clever people but for specific instances
and hardware and if your machine or method of working didn't exactly match
you were on your own and expected to modify or amend to suit yourself..
The GUI interfaces were mostly appallingly bad too.
A quick look a few minutes ago shows nothing much appears to have
changed in years LOL...
Steve Blackmore
On 21/09/2019 01:13:13, 'John Dammeyer' johnd@...
[mach1mach2cnc] <mach1mach2cnc@...> wrote:
Anyone on this group who tried LinuxCNC for a while and then returned to
using MACHx? If so, could you list the reasons why?
Thanks
John
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Posted by: "John Dammeyer" <johnd@...>
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