How to get involved?

Hi All,

Preface: First post on this forum. I have googled this topic in a few different ways, so please be gentle if I just google-failed here.

So, I've embarked on my first LinuxCNC project, and am struggling for what I feel like are fixable reasons, and would like to help fill in some gaps I'm struggling with, and would like some guidance as to how to do that. I have struggled to find existing resources for the things I'm facing, and have had to do a lot of trial-and-error, and piecing things together from disparate sources. I'd like to help fix that problem, if I can.

I'm about as competent as they come in this arena, but I find some of the documentation lacking for my purposes. Once I find the nugget of information I need, I'm off to the races, but I'm finding it rather difficult to find those nuggets. I'd like to help pad out some of the docs, and perhaps help with some code, once I feel comfortable doing so. I'm thinking along the lines of some "cookbook" template/examples to show people a) what is possible, and b) how to do it (through my struggles!). For starters, I'd be using my build as a case study, but longer term, I'm thinking of doing some more advanced stuff, like building my own tool changer for an R8 machine that was not designed to do so.

My question to the community, and particularly those that are maintainers of some of the docs: Where should I contribute and how should I get started? 
To qualify my chops as a serious contributor, I've already built my own RT PREEMPT kernel, and figured out how to integrate that into the "vanilla" linuxcnc distro to suit my hardware, and now have a base-level functional milling machine. I am a career firmware engineer with 20 or so years of linux experience, have an electrical engineering degree, learned CAD at ~13 years old, been using machine tools for over 2 decades, and used to design and build CNC machines for work. In my current position, we are using an Apache project as the basis for the product we build, and contribute back a fair amount of code, so I at least have my feet wet with working with OSS teams.

If you read this far, please don't take any of this as harsh criticism. I just suspect if I'm struggling in this way, I'm not alone, and would like to help.

If anyone in the docs/dev community would be willing to point me in the right direction, I'd much appreciate it!

Thank you!

Hi,
first, thanks for your feedback, it is always welcome. It's important for us to know the weak points of the documentation. We as devs know where to find the information, but we don't have the view of a new user.

You are welcome to create an issue on GitHub (github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/issues) or even better you can provide a pull request with the fix/improvement.
You are also welcome to contribute to the project beyond the documentation.
Feel free to ask if you have further questions.


 

Some specifics about your struggles would help.

Anybody can submit pull requests...