LinuxCNC New user experience

Hello,

Today I tried linuxcnc for the first time and I want to let you know how it went !

Yesterday I built a 3018pro kit and I was amazed when I made the spindle turn and move around.

Today at the shop I was talking about it with a friend who is also wanting to try the DIY CNC adventure.

He told me he was going to buy one of those simple 500$ DRO style touchscreen computer from amazon or maybe run Mach 3

I told him I thought Mach3 looked stale and boo proprietary software.

I told him there's probably a way to get octoprint or klipper to drive the thing, if he really wanted that 90s DRO chique I mentionned linuxcnc. A topic I had not really thought about in more than 15 years

He was non-plus so I said it looks about the same, I loaded up the webpage on my computer.

I scoured the front page for a view of what it looks like. Something with X Y Z and some numbers like many of our heirloom machines have in the shop.

But the front page is bereft of worthwhile screenshots. We saw the amazon-worker-bot video, I told him, linuxcnc is like a DRO plus gcode playback engine in one. And that there's probably a way to fit it between Kiri:Moto making the gcode and klipper who would interpret the gcode.

then I searched the document page, openned that big ass PDF and found this image

 

See, it's kind of like octoprint, but less 3dprintery, and we're probably going to use both at once maybe ?

Not sure, I ordered 6x 15mm by 1500 square ways and 3x 16mm ballscrew then we talked milling machine design and drooled at 7x14" mini lathe

While on the hour long drive home I figured, hey maybe I can try linuxcnc, like right now as soon as I step out of my truck !

Some x86 computer, hook it up to that usb port which is probably some usb-serial, maybe these cheap machine all speak a common protocol, probably something real simple too. I bet it's already in linuxcnc, these things have been around for so long !

Got home, grabbed an obsolete chromebox and I have this cheap 5 inch touchscreen, hook that up, download the linuxcnc iso to a stick and boot that up

Here is what happenned nest !

(Oh BTW, I insert an image attachement here and it completely broke this comment's formatting into single non-stop block of text)
(Also BTW, image limit is still just 1.6MB so had to resize down everything) (please at least autoresize server side ?)

It's booting !

 
 
 touchscreen works !
 wifi works !
 
 But can't find a way to pop up the onscreen keyboard for the touchscreen
 
 
 
  debian quirkyness, it asks you to save the partition setup, you have to click yes
  But you can also click continue ! and then it asks you again.
 
  Maybe the button to continue should just be [YES OVERWRITE THE PARTITION] or something
 
  
   
   asking the user about proxies, when there's working internet, not sure that's necessary, fortunately you can just ignore and continue
   
   
    
    booting !

that should auto-login by default imho
    
 
 
 Tried out the latency thing
 
 Here are the results
 
 
 
 
 
 
 machine selection
 
 hmm my board is something vigo
 
can't find it here

"minimal xyz" yeah, sounds about right

 
 
 ok hit the 8 images limit here so post, hopefully it doesn't just make me post all this again !
 

ok continued !

unfortunately it crashed on start 
 

I hooked up the usb cable to the milling 



the touchscreen is glitching out :\

I need an approriate pointing device


 

So I got the steam controller

I was really really hoping that plugging that in, the X/Y/Z axis on the conroller would start moving the axes but sadly, nothing happened !

Then I realized the linuxcnc program wasn't able to full screen with only 1024x768 of resolution

So I increased the display resolution to 1280x1024

I tried the other programs

 

I checked out the USB devices

turns out it's the same company that makes the touchscreen as the stepper driver board !


 

the device name is /dev/ttyUSB0

 

then I made some midnight bacon and eggs
and started typing this
the sun's out now, I'm going to bed !

 

 

some picture of the 3018pro mill 

the finished machine 
even has wifi for remote operation !



closeup of the pendant board

 

and the main board

 

you main board is not direct compatible with linuxcnc.
you can not use linuxcnc with USB-Boards

I don't quite know what I want here with this project. 

I want to be able to feed a gcode file
have a touchscreen with basic DRO like display
view the gcode,  play / stop the gcode
ability to type in gcode for immediate execution
have a cnc pendant for manual control (this is why I had joystick controllers handy, I was hoping to move the axes with regular joystick controls)

This project is gigantic, I'm pleasantly surprised I was able to make it run at all in an evening.

I think what I need is, whenever linuxcnc interpret a line of gcode, I want to pipe this line through a bash script and out the serial port (once I figure out how to talk to the controller. I'm sure it will have an immediate execution mode of gcode, where you just push gcode to it and it runs it in sequence)

My board is apparently made by a chinese company called Vintech, the board is vigo-something, it's also used in laser cutters.
The pendant that comes with it that has an esp32 is called a "vigostick"

When the user in linuxcnc commands a jog, does linuxcnc create the gcode for that and sends it to the decoder engine
Or does manual control output directly to the stepper drivers ?







 

If you are using a USB board, the Gcode motion controller is on the board so you can send it a file to be run
With Linuxcnc, the motion controller is on the PC. You don't send it a file, instead you open the file and Linuxcnc interprets it and directly controls the motors.
Because Linuxcnc is THE MOTION CONTROLLER it must  run in real time (using the PREEMPT_RT patched kernel.)
Nothing over USB is possible to be done in real time due to the underlying protocols so your existing controller is useless (you don't need two motion controllers).

Your computer needs either a Ethernet port or a parallel port to interface to your motors so likely your Chromebook has neither.

Some of your issues  mentioned about the experience are nothing to do with Linuxcnc but are part of the Linux operating system installation. Linuxcnc is an application that is run on Linux.

Is there a way to make linuxcnc log to file each line of gcode as it is executed by the motion engine ?

shodan wrote:

Is there a way to make linuxcnc log to file each line of gcode as it is executed by the motion engine ?

Not really, the code is interpreted into a buffer and dscarded which  could be miles ahead of where the actual machine excution is.
There is a low level structure called state tags which contsins the actual state of the machine right now in real time but it is not the Gcode.
There is not really a way to access this data except by a custom feature in a GUI.