Basic Hardware Configuration

Greetings...

My company provides innovative systems integration services. We are intrigued by the possibility of integrating operational/performance data from CNC machines into ERP planning systems along the lines of MTConnect.

We'd like to get a 'basic' system that we can play around and explore with.

From my understanding, we'd need a Ubuntu machine. No problem. Connection to the 'CNC' machine is via onboard parallel port - reminds me of my days of serial port programming, RT-11 and VAX/VMX but I digress

My question is, if we just want to get LinuxCNC up with a simple, cheap piece of machine hardware so that we can show the ability to interface to the HAL API - what would I need? Would a cheap 3-Axis drive box from Xylotex suffice? We don't really need it to do anything useful. Just making the drives spin would suffice.

Or maybe something like this off of Ebay - CNC 3020 ROUTER ENGRAVER MACHINE DRILLING / MILLING

All we want is a cheap, demonstrable LinuxCNC setup.

Any help or guidance would be most appreciated.

Steve Guilford
Database Plugins, LLC.

If you need cheapest setup only for presentation, not for real machining, please look at kits like this
www.ebay.com/itm/3-1-5-3A-CNC-NEMA23-24V...&hash=item1c1f9a7fdf
I have controller of this type (but 4-axis) and found it useful. It should work out-of-box with Emc2, while some troubles can be while determining its LPT port pinout, if it is not documented in kit.

If you have a similar controller setup, can you provide an example HAL file?

Also I do think the Xylotex might be a good choice with a simple parallel port system
because it has been around for a long time and has an example HAL file

Thank you all for your suggestions.

Is the Etch-A-CNC available? That could be a 'cute' demo item at tradeshows. I'd certainly be the first person to hook up an Etch-A-Sketch to an Oracle Database !!!

Good link Andy, that is cool.

Cheap, portable…
axis.unpy.net/etchcnc

Might be fun to build just for the heck of it.

Rick G