Fadal Retrofit

Have a Fadal 4020HT with 88HS controller and like the interface, solid machine. Like most that are using the fadals, I want to set up a DNC server to drip feed the system. Additionally, would like to have a GUI interface for macros etc. Getting the raspberry pi to act as a serial server should be straightforward. Have the raspberry pi with a touch screen that I will power from the pendant (it is actually 5 V happily) and will run a serial cable to the 232 interface on the machine. I really like the GUI from PathPilot and in an ideal world, would plan on a full GUI showing tooling path as it passed the code to the mill. I do not need the Linux CNC to run servo motors, just want the GUI and serial communication to the machine. How would you recommend I start such a project? Install linuxCNC on the pi and axis or gmoccapy and turn off everything? find a copy of PathPilot for the pi and modify? Comments on a starting block is what I am hoping to get from this post. Thanks

Sounds like you want a new control with out the work of a retrofit, or a new GUI front end for an ancient control. I'm afraid you are going to be out of luck, there is no such thing as a free lunch. (but Linuxcnc is close)

Will post updates as I progress. andypugh - thank you very much,,, definitely has me going in the right direction.

I think what you need is a copy of Fadal Assist. It has DNC and graphics plotting. There are a couple different versions, the windows version is probably the most recent. I suspect you will quickly find the feed rate limit resulting from the baud rate limit. There are two ways to get around it, install extended memory or use the convert to arcs option in your software. If your software does t support multi plane arcs' you might look into something like Filtermax. I Iike Fadal, easy to fix, easy to program. Very intuitive control.

I have the same setup and my OLD XP computer died. Was hoping to set up a raspberry pi to replace it. Did you get this going? If so, please share the details with me. Thank you.

I attempted to get a desktop running linux to send programs via rs-232 and didn’t have much luck. There are no fancy linux apps for serial communications. You can try minicom, but plan on being at the linux command line. You can also use shell commands which is even more painful then minicom. I ended up loading up win 7 and using a free dnc package I found on github. For a Fadal, Assist is pretty hard to beat. Yiu can also go big bucks and get Cimco dnc.