network sharing with LinuxCNC

clive wrote: Thank you guys,
Leaving off a basic calculator seem, at least to me, going a bit far. A bit like cutting off a leg to lose weight :laugh:

The time it took to post that, you could have actually installed one :laugh:

It's like complaining that no one has picked up that bit of paper you saw on the floor 2 days ago.

To be fair, the ISO is just has enough bits & bobs to get a cnc machine up & running, remember it's not a desktop. Just enough Linux.

The arrangement I have is a ten-year-old Dual E4500 Xeon computer driving an Avid 48" x 48" gantry machine. It is used for art work, which you can see here Howe McCarthy . The G-Code is created by a software package I wrote just for our artwork (a GTK-3 GUI and C code). We previously used the, very ugly, Mach software to drive the CNC machine on XP. For work on smaller machines we use an Arduino and GRBL and something like bCNC.

So that is the context.

in addition to my LinuxCNC computer, i have several Linux servers (file, website, etc...), a Win10 computer (CAD), and my Linux laptop.

I use a combination of SSH and SMB. i have a SMB folder on my file server for CNC data, so i can just pull off the G-code file from my LinuxCNC computer. the advantage of the file server is that i can store a ton of G-code files, when needed, and be able to find older G-code for duplicate runs.
i use SSH mainly between my Linux laptop and the LinuxCNC computer to edit config files (still working on my LCNC machine) from the comfort of being anywhere my laptop is.

~Travis

Did mean a Core 2 Duo or did you mistype the Xeon number ?

I'll assume a Core 2 Duo for now. I'll also assume that you are used the Linuxcnc Wheezy install media.

Wheezy has gone EOL, so depending when you did the actual install you may have to update the apt sources prior to installing any software. No your machine wont stop working or any nonsense like that. The apt sources issue has been mentioned a few times on the forum, the search function is your best friend.

ATM the best thing is to keep with Wheezy due to the use of the Parallel Port.

No with Samba, there could be some differences in the Wheezy Samba version and the version on Mint 20. This may or may not cause some headaches. So you'll need to consult google or your preferred search engine to sort out any issues.

BTW the way unless you can identify which actual Linuxcnc media you used for your installation I'm kind of guessing here.

As for Mint on the cnc box, installing a recent version of Mint would be a performance hit if my experience with Mint on a Core 2 Duo is anything to go by.

Hey Travis your setup seems similar to my home network, with the exception of having a Win10 box for my old mother and a Win 98 machine for some old hardware, mainly Needham EPROM programmer. Found it on ebay for $50 with all the modules.

The old box I have is a Dell 530 workstation from ages ago. The CPU's proper name is a Xeon Core2 Duo E4500. There are actually two distinct CPUs in the box. It's a massive affair. I burned a LinuxCNC ISO a while ago and that is what I installed. The machine itself is hopelessly out of date. It only has PATA connectors but I have some spare PCI to SATA converter boards :whistle: Wheezy is what I have.

I should say that it works and works well. I feel much safer with a Linux box, even an old one, than a funky XP box and proprietary software.

For my networking issue I'm using a discarded laptop with Avahi that seems to be friendly for file sharing between Wheezy and my workstation. SMB has recent issues because Microsoft changed something and SMB now half-works :ohmy: So I get to do two drag-and-drops.

OFF TOPIC
For my kind of artwork GRBL works well. The parallel port interface to the stepper drivers was a good idea but, very obviously, has demands on the OS that are just wrong. An Arduino is perfect for real-time stuff but, despite GRBL being a wonderful piece of code, it ends up doing too much. The heavier compute power of a modern Linux box should do all the planning etc. and leave just the real-time buffering to the Arduino. An intermediate communication form is needed. A cheap way of doing it would be to package up the parallel port data and shovel that to an Arduino and let it do the real time stuff.

And further, LinuxCNC should have code that optimizes the cuts and movement. My own code has to arrange the G-Code in an efficient order which is a task the machine driver should do. Tedious stuff like finding the next nearest cut, a TSP at heart, should not be left to the G-CODE generator.

OK, rant over.

That's why Mesa FPGA boards are so popular. Linuxcnc does the motion planning and then the step & direction signals are done by the FPGA. This allows a little bit more leeway with latency.

The Beagle Bone Black uses as similar approach but uses the on board PRU to do the realtime stuff, basically the BBB has 2 on die mcu's that aren't touched by the OS, apart from uploading the firmware and communication. Well that's the simplified version.

I'm intrigued regard your CPU, still can't find any info online. If you feel like it, just for interests sake (well maybe my own) could you post the output of this command: