What's the Oddest Machine You Have Powered with LinuxCNC

 The title say it all. I am genuinely wondering. What is the oddest machine you have either seen or powered yourself
with LinuxCNC? So far mine has been
a Pick and Place machine
a CNC 4 axis foam cutter soon to be 5 axis

Not that odd I know. But still. I know there's got to be some really interesting ones out there.
I figured this topic could help new people who will probably wonder just how capable LInuxCNC is.
So come on, what do you got?

What do you mean by "oldest machine"? Do you mean what machine have we had running Linuxcnc for the longest or the actual physical machines? I know there are people out there who have CNCed ancient manual mills and lathes with Linuxcnc, so nothing I have would be any contest for them. But I do have machines that have been running Linuxcnc for more than 10 years.

Oops, I misread the question it is Odd not Old.  (maybe it is time to have my eyeglass prescription redone.)
The oddest machine I have under Linuxcnc control is an 8 spindle gang router with 8 separate Z-axis and spindles mounted on a 12ft long gantry (11 joints of movement).

For a second there I thought I had misspelled the title or something. LOL
Sounds like a cool machine Todd.

Photos or it didn't happen

You guys describe these machines without showing us. That is torture.
Cheers,
Mark

Here Is a picture of it. 
 

Hi Todd, can you explain what does this machine do? I didnt understand.

Thanks.

Wow!!!

It is used for decorative wood carving (signs, plaques...). Carving 8 pieces at a time. Originally it only had a single Z axis. with a hand screw for fine adjustment of each spindle height. This was difficult to maintain and adjust the Z depth between each spindle for varying material thicknesses or when changing tools. So I recently rebuilt the machine with a separate closed loop stepper motor, ball screw and linear guides on each spindle. I also replaced the old single servo, 12ft torque tube, rack and pinion drive system for the Y axis with new larger linear ways, two ball screws and 2 servos. Then after doing all of that work I found out that the majority of the slop in the old system wasn't due to compliance in the old drive train, but fex in the bridge. So I stiffened the bridge, and it is greatly improved. (The X also got new ways, and replaced a belt driven lead screw with a direct drive ball screw and added tool touch probe and probing routine.)

Coincidentally that machine was also the very first machine I ever setup/retrofitted to run Linuxcnc (EMC2 at the time) and it has been running it the longest. But back then it started out as a simple 3 axis control with 3 step/dir commanded servos using software stepgens and no control of the VFDs. (The operator had to manually start/stop the spindles/VFDs.)

Then few years later I added a Mesa 5i25/7i85S combo, to add encoder feedback to close the position loop in Linuxcnc and fast hardware step-generation. Soon after that I used Mb2hal, to add control of the 8 spindle VFDs to Linuxcnc.

I have nearly a 20yr history with this machine since we bought it new, with more than half of those years running EMC2/Linuxcnc.

I wanna ask a question. What are you using as controller?(SBC or normal computer). Since i didn't setup a machine with normal computer, i am wondering about this topic. I usually worked with SBCs, so i didn't use parallel port or that kind of stuff. Is it hard, what do you think?