15m Industrial Plasma Cutter

at that size and costs of the HARDWARE
there is no way around Hybrid servos that costs you only 25% more then a Stepper Setup
and 4NM is a overkill on Rack pinion

the Images above show clear the use of Grinded T10 like Racks this is what we used in shop
and you can get on a Mesa fast and precice motion

Jarman,

For cladding the boilers... What is the size you need to cladd the boilers in Z and Y value?
X is 15m.

UK is the country of steam locomotives. The country with car companies like Aston Martin, Bentley, McLaren and so on.
The UK has some under-developped places i know. I was there 2 years ago.

The UK developped a plane that can carry up vertical on a war ship.. Very cool !!!.

In Holland we only have a old wind mill of 1650 at Kinderdijk. We sold all our tanks 10 years ago.
All what is left are rusty bridges, and rusty traffic sign's on the highway.

We pay so much to the state, nothing happens over here. It's a shame. I am done with this.
My wish is to be a non member of the dutch economy.

Thanks all.

I got my hands on a refurbished computer and am now at the stage of installing Linux and subsequently LinuxCNC.

Are there pros and cons to using Debian or Ubuntu?

I read that Ubuntu can be a little bloated / doesn't have quite as good support?

Once I have installed a Linux operating system, I am planning on installing Debian 9 Stretch. I am thinking of doing this becuase the 7 Wheezy is not compatible with ethernet Mesa boards which I will be using.

I was hoping someone could let me know if I am on the right lines?

Thanks.

at that mashine size you need to go with the last stable relaease

then at any time you can update

Thanks for the replies.

I have booted from the Debian LinuxCNC live boot (USB) and run a latency test.

My numbers don't look great:


Max Interval (ns) Max Jitter (ns)


Servothread (1ms): 1045022 45022


Base thread (25μs): 121499 96499


I am concerned that this is too high. I suspect the problem is that the pc I am using does not have a separate graphics card.

If I am using servo motors, do I only need to concern myself with the 45022 number?


Thanks.

For a Mesa card, 45,000 is absolutely fine and better than my PC.
For Plasma you really should be using Mesa cards and their THCAD daughterboard.
Machine size has no bearing on what version of Linuxcnc to run.

Gantries are much easier to configure if you use at least Version 2.8 as it has the ability to square the gantry on homing based on offsets in your configuration.

The plasmac configuration for Plasma requires a minimum version of 2.8 which is missing one feature used for error recovery which it uses in v2.9.

Plasmac is by far the least path of resistance for a plasma machine.

In my view the current 2.7 release is just not an option you should consider for this machine and I think error recovery will be important on such large jobs on such thin material.

Therefore I suggest you run the master branch (V 2.9).

Some might tell you that master branch might break as development features are added (and it does occasionally) but I've been using it for about 4 years and that has only happened a couple of times and its usually fixed in a couple of days. Once you have everything working, there is no need to update it again unless there is a feature you really want.

Finally, just use plasmac in its default configuration and if there is something extra that you require in your application, see if Phill will add it first before changing it yourself. The more feedback we get from the real world, the better Plasmac will become.

Thanks guys.

I'm having a bit of trouble trying to install the 2.9 version.

I've been following the instructions here: buildbot.linuxcnc.org/

But I get to the point of running: "sudo apt-get install linuxcnc" (at the bottom of the page),
and I get:

user@debian:~$ sudo apt-get install linuxcnc
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package linuxcnc is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'linuxcnc' has no installation candidate


Does anyone have any experience with this? I saw a thread on this from a month ago but with no conclusive answer.

Thanks