Hurco BMC 20 Ultimax 3 Retrofit

andypugh wrote:

Have you seen:
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?The_Is..._Parameter_And_GRUB2

I did, it was not totally clear to me as the lines of code that are at the top of that page is different from what I have.

Do I just add isolcpus=1 to the end of the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line?



I will be back out there tonight, i really need to get lan cables run out to the shop and to the machine. My LinuxFu is not very strong either.

I have 0,1,2 isolated and down to servo 62k, base 27k! I am getting an occasional spike to 75k in the servo, it seems like it is running mostly about 30k, climbs a bit with the occasional spike.

Heck of a lot better than it was before!

Soooo now I should be down to a 6% error. I think I am going to try some other PC's just to see, but I am going to get back to getting the rest of things rolling now.

Back to getting limits hooked up tomorrow, and servo enables!

I did run across EuSurplus's wiki page www.wiki.eusurplus.com/index.php?title=Install_LinuxCNC

With there dummy proofed how to on it I got it done. Thanks EuSurplus!

Have you tried other isolcpu combinations? Usually on a 4 core cpu isolating half the cpu works best (0,1 or 2,3).

I tried 2,3 first and it did not improve. I am going to try 0,1 tonight, and ill try 1,2,3 going from 170k to 65k was a nice improvement. I will have some video cards to try swapping also. I have not figured out how to disable hyperthreading in the Dell bios yet either.

Jake wrote:

I have 0,1,2 isolated and down to servo 62k, base 27k! I am getting an occasional spike to 75k in the servo, it seems like it is running mostly about 30k, climbs a bit with the occasional spike.

Heck of a lot better than it was before!

Soooo now I should be down to a 6% error. I think I am going to try some other PC's just to see, but I am going to get back to getting the rest of things rolling now.

Well, that is probably good enough for most work. But, the good motherboards get it down to about 5 us. I don't know why some do so much worse. One other thing is to turn off all the acceleration stuff in the graphics driver, or switch to using the totally basic graphics driver instead of a board-specific one. There should be instructions on how to do that in the wiki.

Jon

I am going to tune on it some more over the weekend and see if I can better it. But since I got a substantial reduction on it, I am going to get back to wiring things up and getting closer to rolling. I should have a couple other PC's to try out this weekend also.

I wish there was one motherboard, processor, video card that was the smoking gun for the best way to go. I think I would go buy it just to get it done.

I just deleted all the files in the linuxcnc folder, started a new config, changed the port and its alive now.

Onto attempting to edit the HAL to get my digital inputs where I want them and setting up homing off the limits.

This is the ppmc_io.hal that I have been attempting to edit. The _1 is the original from the configuration. I # out the lines that I was not sure about what I was going to do.

The first thing I am trying to get past is just get the limits on the right "din" and get the servo SSR to operate correctly. I am kinda trying a step at a time so when I screw something up it may be easier to debug.

I need to setup my limits as home switches also as my machine has no home switches

Am I thinking right that I can just edit the locations in the hal and save it and that is all I have to do or is there a better way to go about it.

Thanks for putting up with me being an askhole!

I did get things up on git also

github.com/jakefreese/LCNC_BMC20

Jake wrote:

I just deleted all the files in the linuxcnc folder, started a new config, changed the port and its alive now.

Best thing is to copy all your hal files to a backup directory, and copy again just before making any major change. That way, if hal blows up when starting LinuxCNC, you can diff the files to see what changed. Actually, hal gives pretty decent error messages, but they can be hard to find with all the other text that is output.

Onto attempting to edit the HAL to get my digital inputs where I want them and setting up homing off the limits.

So, to home off the -X limit, you would make the X stanza in ppmc_io.hal look like this :
linksp Xminlim <= ppmc.0.din.01.in-not
linksp Xminlim => axis.0.neg-lim-sw-in
linksp Xmaxlim <= ppmc.0.din.02.in-not
linksp Xmaxlim => axis.0.pos-lim-sw-in
linksp Xminlim axis.0.home-sw-in

This copies the state of the Xminlim signal to the axis 0 home input. Then, in the ini file, in the [AXIS_0] section, you would need to set :
HOME_OFFSET = 1.0
HOME_SEARCH_VEL = -0.5
HOME_LATCH_VEL = 0.1
HOME_USE_INDEX = YES
HOME_IGNORE_LIMITS = YES

Assuming that you have index pulses on your encoders. The above will start the homing move in the minus direction at 30 IPM (0.5 IPS), when it hits the -X limit switch it will reverse and then make a slower approach,
when it trips the 2nd time, it will begin to back away from the switch at 6 IPM (0.1 IPS) until it hits the index pulse. It will then move 1.0 inch in the +X direction to the true home position which will be +1.0 inch from where the index pulse was detected.

If you DON'T have encoder index pulses, then turn the HOME_USE_INDEX = NO, and I think the rest should be OK.

The first thing I am trying to get past is just get the limits on the right "din" and get the servo SSR to operate correctly. I am kinda trying a step at a time so when I screw something up it may be easier to debug.

You can check which digital inputs are doing what with Halmeter from the Machine pull-down menu on the Axis screen. Select the digital inputs from the "Pins" menu, and then watch as you trip the switches manually.

Am I thinking right that I can just edit the locations in the hal and save it and that is all I have to do or is there a better way to go about it.

Yes, but there are some restrictions. One big one is that only one signal can be assigned to an input or output HAL pin. If you try to assign two different signals to one pin, it causes an error message and LinuxCNC will not start. I suspect that may be what you ran into.

Jon

Thanks for putting up with me being an askhole!

I did get things up on git also

github.com/jakefreese/LCNC_BMC20[/quote]