linuxcnc 2.7 or 2.8 for a production machine

Hi I'm in the process of learning and I don't know which version of the linuxcnc to use, I'm starting with a retrofit and I need it to be as reliable as possible
I have already tried both but I really would like to know which one is the most reliable.

2.8 is not officially released and had some major changes in it.
2.7 is the most tested

Chris m

does any body know the aprox relase date for 2.8?

Nope, but If I had to put a number on it. Sometime within in the next 5 years. (but probably more like 1-2)

Plenty of people are using V2.8 on production machines. Mainly becasue of the superior gantry support. If you do find and report a bug, the responsiveness with which it is fixed is pretty amazing for open source. But unless it's a gantry, I'd probably stay on V2.7

I run all three machines with 2.7. Two of them run with three step motors (each axis one motor with screws and respective ball nuts) and the biggest one 2200x1100mm, has two steppers on X-axis (from 0-2200mm) rack 'n' pinion, one stepper on Y-axis (from 0-1100mm) rack 'n' pinion, and one for Z-axis (0-100mm) ball nut system. No loose steps though max speed on machine 10'000 mm/min. Two X - motors homed with one limit switch, parallelism of gentry manually checked before cutting starts. I did not tried 2.8 yet, I am afraid I would make mistake in settings and machine would get ''twisted''.

probamo wrote:

I. I did not tried 2.8 yet, I am afraid I would make mistake in settings and machine would get ''twisted''.

Thats the whole point of the Joint axis code in master. If you have home switches on each side of the gantry, the machine cannot get twisted. And if it does when you convert, you just change the homing offset on one side in software. It should only take 10 minutes to convert.

Is there possibility directly to create joints from stepcofing, or should I pass first through stepconfig and then manually to modify ''ini'' file? Is there any other files I should consider to change?

I'm still too noob so as I'm still learning I will stick to 2.7
thank you.

If you wanted to switch your gantry machine from 2.7, I would suggest making a copy of your config folder, then try to "convert" it. 2.8 has a script built in that will attempt to automatically convert a machine configuration from the old (2.7 and earlier) format to the new Joints-Axis format, when you try to open it with the new 2.8. The conversion for a non standard config, will almost certainly fail to provide a perfect working config, for a non standard non-trivial kinematics machine. But it will do most of the work of converting the config, and a few simple hand edits should straighten out every thing else. The hand edits would be related to setting up the slaved joint for the gantry.

Those same edits would still have to be done if you tried to use Stepconfig to create a new config. Stepconfig has not been modified to be able to set up a slaved joint gantry yet.