4 axis cnc winch style foam hotwire configuration

mt92 wrote:

I have built a copy of the machine on this german website. www.cnc-hotwire.de/
I am having some problem configuring the hal and ini files and also the kinematics. Should I use ubuntu 8.04 or will 10.04 work?

The Ubuntu version ought to be irrelevant, as long as LinuxCNC works on it.

What problems are you having? Error messages, or not the correct motion?

The hal and ini files go in linuxcnc/configs/yourconfig and the kinematics files go in usr/realtime-2.6.32-122rtai/modules/linuxcnc will have to be copied using root privileges.

sudo cp source destination

John

mt92 wrote:

Actually I do not know where to put the hal, ini, and kenemetics files that I got from the google code website.

The HAL and INI files go in a config directory in your LinuxCNC/configs directory.

Simplest thing to do is to create a dummy config with Stepconf, give the machine a suitable name, and skip through to the end ignoring the rest of the config. That creates a populated config folder.
Then copy the INI and HAL that you have into that directory, over-writing the ones that stepconf created.

What you do with the kinematics file rather depends on if it is a C file, or a compiled module. What's the file name?

mt92 wrote:

Thanks alot. I will reinstall 10.04 and go from there,

Whether you use Ubuntu 8.04 or 10.04 depends on which works best with your computer hardware.
You can use any version of LinuxCNC or EMC2 on either operating system.
However, a LiveCD installation is the easiest way, see the download link on the left.

You might be interested in the specific changes recently made in master for hotwire style machines.
Sammel has modified the Axis UI preview to display a hotwire toolpath properly, see for example:


You need to get the 2.6 development version of LinuxCNC to activate this feature, but that can be done later.
Get the machine running first.

mt92 wrote:

I am have alot of trouble getting the kinematics file copied into /usr/realtime-2.6.32-122-rtai/modules

First things first..
What is the file called? is it a .ko or a .c file?

This makes a huge difference to what you need to do with it.