Yet another gantry CNC router.

[mitchejc]

Congrats, its a VERY nice build, well done! I can imagine lots of hours going into those great looking alu parts! I just love the neat looks of an all aluminium build. Very good suggestion by Silyavski, maybe put a little block of wood or plastic to hard stop it just to prevent it running off the rails if required and ditch the lower Z switch.

Sorry, I don't want to stray too far from the topic but since you have first hand experience, whats your opinion of LinuxCNC so far?

[cambesol]

Congrats, its a VERY nice build, well done! I can imagine lots of hours going into those great looking alu parts! I just love the neat looks of an all aluminium build. Very good suggestion by Silyavski, maybe put a little block of wood or plastic to hard stop it just to prevent it running off the rails if required and ditch the lower Z switch.

Thanks! From start to finish has been around eighteen months which included the control system and liquid cooling. The machining took around 9 months but this is only five hours per week due to work/family commitments. I prefer face-milled aluminium rather than lots of extrusion because it looks nice. Not the fastest way to go, but worth it in the end. It does have a hard-stop, the spindle will not drop onto the table.

Sorry, I don't want to stray too far from the topic but since you have first hand experience, whats your opinion of LinuxCNC so far?

I use Linux a lot (I develop embedded software, drivers etc running on Linux of all flavours) so for me it was a natural choice. I really like LinuxCNC, the work flow I described in the first post has yielded good results although I haven't produced anything that I want to post on this forum yet due to the f*****g limit switch causing random paths to be followed (design flaw, please don't ask - too embarrassing). Today I have drawn up some replacement parts made in acrylic which should fix the problem. I will post a picture when I have my final test piece finished this week.

Linux is not for everyone as it can be frustrating trying to figure out what you need to know to fix a problem. LinuxCNC, once configured, works very well indeed.

In a few months I want to dig deeper into BlenderCAM as it can produce some incredible results. The UI on Blender is a bit of a nightmare though and the learning curve is significant so for the moment I am sticking to 2.5D designs.

[mitchejc]

Good to know. Are you running via a parallel port BOB or are you using one of the smarter usb/ethernet controllers?

I have not really looked into it but first prize for me would be if one can run LinuxCNC on the new Raspberry Pi2 to do the trajectory planning and maybe offload the pulse generation to something else. With your experience maybe something you can do for us