How does a fully configured Linuxcnc system compare to industrial controls.

Depending on the skillset and availability, I would consider anything between 40 and 100 USD per hour as reasonable.

I totally understand many people do this out of passion and do not want this to become a paid job. That's fine with me and I really like the spirit of it. However, from a business point of view it makes sense to use a shortcut if it saves more time than it costs in equivalent.

JR1050 wrote:

Not having the standard lathe canned cycles , this is a must.

 

Which canned cycles are missing? 

G70, G71 and G72 are coming in the 2.9 release:  linuxcnc.org/docs/2.9/html/gcode/g-code.html#gcode:g70

The forums, mail list and IRC/Matrix offer plenty of community support.

Tormach uses LCNC for its CNC machines and offers paid and warranty support for them.

Mesa offers support through the community and I believe that you can pay them for support and customization for their electronics and firmware.

Pico Systems pico-systems.com offers LCNC compatible hardware for sale and I think Jon will take on custom board designs in exchange for payment.

ONE Labs mostly uses LCNC for all the machines we make from CNC to multi-axis printers to DNA synthesizers. Alec even took over RTAI development about 10 years ago. All our customers have paid support and we are frequent on the community channels.

From time to time I hear people asking for paid help and usually find the answers for free on the forums, IRC or ML. Others have found long time LCNC users to be paid consultants to make a custom GUI, HAL comp or similar.

-there are 3 chinese companies that make laser cutters and use LinuxCNC for those, another one did the same thing but hired a dumb f@k that called us here "morons" and lost his job, probably hired someone else that was also here, so that makes 4 companies, just have a read through this forum where laser are mentioned.
-another chinese company uses LinuxCNC for big paletising robots that stack boxes with a redone GUI, i installed 2 of those, the GUI just says "Lcnc", but under it sure enough is LinuxCNC with its classic ladder. There are a lot of things still in English in there.
-about 10 or more years back, one of the big hard drive manufacturers in Taiwan used LinuxCNC (EMC2 back then) for running the fully automated assembly line, no GUI that i could see
-about 2-3 years back i bumped into a eastern European factory that sold lathes and mills with LinuxCNC, GUI was redone and name was changed but apparently left the "calibration", "show hal configuration", "hal meter" and "and scope" on one of the settings page.
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If anyone feels so inclined, i am sure some of the big boys are using it disguised with fancy GUI's and added features....
I do not blame them, reliability is exponentially better than whatever they were using under windoze.
P.S.
When i mention reliability of LinuxCNC, ONLY Axis GUI is reliable from the fancy GUI's included. That is my "yard stick". The underlying stuff is extremely reliable.

I’ll have to upgrade . I started writing a G75 grooving cycle , I got distracted and need to finish it. Truthfully, I kinda like programming it from a model.

I’d still kinda like to see the tool table straightened out. Pin it to a tab, loose all the confusing buttons, add the ability to do an incremental offset and wear offsets. I started a thread about this a bit ago and got some suggestions on how to start. I just need the time.

JR1050 wrote:

I’d still kinda like to see the tool table straightened out. 

You mean tool-editor, of course? 

A tool database manager with a graphical front end might be a useful project. Something that does the things you describe but has a proper database behind it, and sends tool data through the new interface:  linuxcnc.org/docs/2.9/html/tooldatabase/tooldatabase.html