EMC2 on a Mac

wizard69 wrote:

I've had Ubuntu installed on a Mac, via VirtutalBox for a long time. However trying to run the normal version of LinuxCNC would cause a very hard rash. At least in the past it did. So I have to ask are you running the emulator version or the normal version?

I cant remember, but running the rt version gets me a kernel oops. running the simulator version is fine, but thats all I need for development. I compile from source.

- MIchael

If I sum up this discussion :
- either a linux partition on my iMac, and I run a cnc machine with EMC2
- or nothing.

Thierry

I'd say you should be able to run RTAI with a base thread from a linux partition, and possibly a servo based RTAI system from vmware - provided you can hook it up to the mac somehow, I dont think the USB connections will help a lot here

- Michael

ThLDQ wrote:

If I sum up this discussion :
- either a linux partition on my iMac, and I run a cnc machine with EMC2
- or nothing.

Thierry

A partition or an externally bootable drive, would get LinuxCNC (EMC) running on your Mac. Note that the external drive doesn't have to be magnetic, in theory you could install Linux to a USB SSD dongle of sufficirpent capacity. In either case running a swap file over USB is probably less than ideal.

As to the or nothing, I don't think any thing is impossible in this regard, but LinuxCNC running natively on Mac OS / BSD would be a massive project. The basic issue being the need to fab a realtime extension and followed by library ports. Controlling a machine from a VM appears to be totally out of the question. So I guess it is a bootable Linux or nothing at this point.

One thing I've been wondering about is Apple & Intels new Thunderbolt port. This looks like it will have huge potential for the CNC community as it avoids all of USBs issues with realtime hardware & software. The unfortunate thing is that hardware development seems to be tied up with Intel being cute. However the thought of a plug in FPGA board has to be rather interesting to many.

www.ecklersoft.com/

Seems to offer a real time solution with a USB dongle and the rt-stepper software, it includes the TKMini.app.
The setup and configuration seem straightforward too.
From what I gather the solution to the hardware needing a constant feed of data is handled by the USB dongle that buffers the needed info and doles it to the CNC controller in real time.
So, in this way the OS needn't have a RTAi kernel extension, just the data flow needs to be real time.
This is very interesting to me as a person that prefers to use Mac OS X platform.