LinuxCNC vs Commercial

I'm new to CNC and was wondering if I could borrow a bit of your time with a few loaded questions?

I've been looking at CNC commercial routers to be used primarily for cabinet manufacturing as well as going the DIY route and building something myself.
I'm a self taught software engineer and have experience in robot building, but nothing that would require high feed rate precision. I originally looked at Mach 3/4, but the interface is unappealing and there appears to be a better community around LinuxCNC.

How does LinuxCNC compare to commercial offerings offered by companies such as Laguna tools software controller for example?
As an example, if I were to put together a machine identical to a commercial offering, would it perform the same?
Does LinuxCNC require a hardware controller to coordinate movement between servo controllers?

Ultimately, the plan is to either get in the deep end and purchase a $125,000 router with ATC and material handling, or start smaller by building a machine with high quality electronics and a sturdy 5000lb frame and add features such as ATC and material handling as it becomes necessary or I want to start taking it on.


Also, any recommendations on books on motor electronics is welcome. I've been pouring through the LinuxCNC documentation, but my inexperience is slowing the pace.

If you have time, skills, knowledge and a back workshop you can make good quality machines that do not require foundry parts. If you fail in one of those premises the best that you can make is a hobby machine that probably will not turn out as good as you want for production.
A router if one of those possible machines.

Are there any commercial distributors that use LinuxCNC?

Tormach do

DuNuNuBatman wrote: How does LinuxCNC compare to commercial offerings offered by companies such as Laguna tools software controller for example?
As an example, if I were to put together a machine identical to a commercial offering, would it perform the same?

It would perform very similarly. It is possible that the commercial control might be slightly better optimised for wood routing.
Until the recent upgrade to the trajectory planner LinuxCNC performed noticably worse than some other controllers at high-speed contouring. That gap has now closed and LinuxCNC is now comparable to commercial router controls, as I understand it.

Does LinuxCNC require a hardware controller to coordinate movement between servo controllers?

No, LinuxCNC _is_ a motion controller. It just happens to run on commodity PC hardware. It can often be helped-out by dedicated step-generation or pwm-generation hardware or hardware encoder counters, but the motion planing is still all handled by LinuxCNC.

Ultimately, the plan is to either get in the deep end and purchase a $125,000 router with ATC and material handling, or start smaller by building a machine with high quality electronics and a sturdy 5000lb frame and add features such as ATC and material handling as it becomes necessary or I want to start taking it on.

If you build your own machine with LinuxCNC then you can alter and modify it any time you want to, without being tied to a manufacturer for upgrades. If you are tied to a manufacturer for upgrades and they go out of business then you have a problem.
You might want to consider buying such an item of orphan hardware and installing LinuxCNC on it. The combination of commercial-quality hardware and an Open controller can be very satisfactory.

What machines are you looking at in the $125,000 price range?
What sort of cabinet milling were you wanting do? (There are different machines more focused to different things, such as pod and rail for lumber and wood stock or flat vacuum tables for sheet material/nested base.)

$125k can get you a lot nicer machine than anything I saw in a quick look on the Laguna Tools website.

Personally, I am a big fan of buying a better quality higher end used machine for the same price as a lower end new one for the same price. (Usually a 5-10 year old commercial grade machine can be bought for roughly half-3/4 it's new price.)

We do a lot of nested milling of MDF sheets, and currently have 6 CNC routers with 5x10ft vacuum tables and 8-12 tool changers cutting nested parts. Most of these are running Fanuc controls, and run 24hr 6 days a week. Only 2 of those machines were bought new, and those 2 are the ones I would most like to see gotten rid of. They are Omni Tech Pal machines, that we paid $60-70k for new. We have 3 Komo Mach1 510 routers, and a Northwood IH510, these are all excellent high end machines that we purchased used for $50-$70k. The one non Fanuc large table router we have is an old SCMI Routmat we picked up dirt cheep from an auction, I was going to retrofit it to Linuxcnc if couldn't revive the old control. I was able to fix the old control, it works, that's all I'll say about it.

The Omni Tech machines are perfectly adequate machines for what they are. They are an inexpensive machine designed for a cabinet shop that will run it 4-8 hour a day, 5 days a week. Using these machines the way we are, they have been a bit of a maintenance headache. We've been told by the manufacuter that in 5 years we put more cutting hours on these machines than any other machine they've sold (and we've had them for 10yrs now).

We also have 8 other light duty CNC and gang routers that we use primarily for carving and engraving. Several of these I have converted over to Linuxcnc.

As to your basic question as to if Linuxcnc is as good as a commercial control. It all depends, on A.) what your compairing it to, and B.) The quality of the Linuxcnc install. (such as how well you integrate safety features, and other things like tool changer implementation...)