Gantry oxyfuel / plasma type machine from scratch

Many thanks Tommylight, seems all clear to me about the mesa boards and encoders.
I will take a look on the mesa website to see how i get all this different boards connected. So, if I got it correctly I need 2 mesa boards the 7i96S and the 7i85S which get connected together. That should work for me.

I will try to take a look on that DMM delay you are talking to. Also because I want to make this machine to work in our shop and I do not care if there is a slight new cost to add to make it go well and precise. I was even thinking of buying the DYN5 servo drives to have EtherCAT if needed. Altogh I prefer to use what I already have, the DYN4, but if needed I can also buy other servos and drives. Then I can always use these DMM ones for something else.

As for the virtual machine, its just more practical to me to make tests and get used to linuxcnc during my work time with my laptop. Later I will set up an dedicated computer. The idea is to buy a new industrial PC for use with the machine.

LinuxCNC will run on VirtualBox and so on and this is handy to do basic testing and configuration. There is a limit on what can be done on a sim without real hardware.

Hi RodW, yeah, sure. I am aware of that. The idea is just to get comfortable and experiment withe the Linuxcnc functionalities, configs etc.... of course later when I get all the stuff set up then will be a dedicated computer with real hardware.

rodw wrote:

LinuxCNC will run on VirtualBox and so on and this is handy to do basic testing and configuration. There is a limit on what can be done on a sim without real hardware.

 

That works. I run several versions of LinuxCNC as virtual machines at once in virsh during development/testing efforts. Virtualbox is great, too, but I got to fighting it all the time on my headless server. Virsh played nicer for me in configuring virtual machines on the headless server over ssh, then I connect with those VMs using Remmina remote desktop.

QEMM on Linux is more to my taste than Virtual Box in Windows. On Linux VB kept getting in a tangle over UEFI

QEMU?