Chinese 3040T Arrives

[Neale]

LinuxCNC was a doddle to get going. Stuck a CD in the front of the machine and hit "Go". Ubuntu recognises all the standard hardware (especially the parallel port) and it just works. The only configuration effort was the same as any machine control setup with any machine - you need to specify which pins on the parallel port do what on the machine (X dir and step, Y dir and step, etc), and tell the software things like how many steps per mm it needs, max speed and acceleration, and so on. My system is Intel but my son has just bought a replacement motherboard for his setup which uses an AMD chip and has no parallel port, so he added a PCI parallel port adaptor. That needed a tiny bit of tweaking in Ubuntu to tell it about the board and the port address, but that's working fine as well. If you have Mach3 already, then I see no reason to change to LinuxCNC and my comments are really for anyone reading this who is starting with a blank sheet. I'm not necessarily recommending LinuxCNC, but it works for me.
I tried some freeware CAM packages (DXF2GCODE for 2D and PyCAM for 3D - I used them on Windows but I know that PyCAM does run on Linux) and they work, up to a point, but they were much harder work than VCarve. On the CAD side, I'm not sure if people use things like Sketchup for more than just engineering-style sketching, but I haven't played with that kind of thing.
Clive - do you have a pointer to the touch probe stuff for LinuxCNC? Google didn't come up with anything obvious when I looked recently.