Newbie asking for resources and advice

Hello All,

  I'm attempting to retrofit a 90's vintage Intelitek Prolight 3000 lathe.  This is a small slant bed CNC lathe marketed to high school and technical college programs, and originally controlled by proprietary electronics and a desktop PC.

The plan is to use LinuxCNC on a Raspberry Pi 4, mated with a Mesa 7i76EU board, along with TB6600 stepper drivers to control and X- and Z-axes as well as a stepper driven 8 position tool changer.  The spindle motor speed is analog controlled 0 - 10 volt signal input.

I have zero experience with most of this and would appreciate any coaching on:

- which Linux distro to load on the Pi 4.
- any resources for configurations, etc.
- any other stuff I don't even know that I don't know.

Thanks in advance!
 

Rykagon wrote:

Hello All,

- which Linux distro to load on the Pi 4.

 

Sounds like a fun project. 
Download the SD card  image at this page .
That should be a good start Pi4 + Mesa 7i76EU + TB6600. I've played a bit with the Pi, never used it in a retrofit, but I read people doing it regularly on this forum.