Thinking of moving my Plasma from Masso to LinuxCNC

Hi all my name is Greg I have been watching this forum for years and this is my first post.

I built a CNC plasma 2 years ago and I used a Masso CNC v3 with their DTHC, as I couldn't get the after market ones to play nicely with it.
I have had nothing but trouble with this machine, yet I have a CNC router and a CNC mill using Masso's and they work great.
The Plasma on Masso is just immature and failure prone. I have built many Plasma cutters for friends using MyPlasm and it is about 1/8 the price and flawless .
I have been watching Rods videos and am very impressed with his results. So I bought a Mesa 7i96 card but I am now retired and a pensioner so I don't have the income like when I was working hence my question , can I implement THC and OHMIC on the existing board or use the ProKeys Fibre linked THC that I have from the Masso experiments and the CNC4PC Ohmic also left over?

Thanks Heaps for any advice 

Cheers Greg.

Arthurs Creek, Vic.

Damn, I thought I may have had a thcad here in Brisbane but I looked and I don't.

If you have a THC that generates an up/down signal, you could use it if you set the right mode in qtplasmac. Looks like the pokeys may do that.

Totally untested but I do think my hypersensing component would probably be able to be modified to do ohmic and voltage sensing it does sense arc voltage but the scale is only 24.5 volts so it just stays on. with better scaling you probably could do both.



 

Hi Greg,

I have a spare THCAD board that was donated to me by a fellow Linuxcnc forum member that I can send to you if you still need it. Its out in my storage unit in Dubbo so it might be a while before I can send it to you.

You can contact me on my email stefanasmusau@hotmail.com

Thanks Heaps Stefan and Rod I just received the THCads and am about to draw up my Transition drawings from masso to linuxcnc.
Have either of you used Qelectrotech for drawing before as I am about to give it a go. Supposedly there are libraries for Mesa boards available.

No worries Greg. I have not used Qelectrotech before but for my wiring diagrams I use old school 2d AutoCAD. I looked at Qelectrotech and it looks good. I have used TinkerCAD and CircuitLab for some university courses I have been studying and they work ok, but I am sure you could do some good drawings with Qelectrotech.

Sean Drummond did a really nice diagram of a 7i96s which you can grab over at plasmaspider  plasmaspider.com/viewtopic.php?p=231679#p231679  

If you want a diagram you can't go better. I usually just create a table of all the pins and where that go. Its better to do it in a word document rather than a spreadsheet so you can add more freeform text/

Thanks Rod
Its a ripper, just what I was after,

I just did the same thing, Please feel free to reach out if you need any help. I feel like I learned a fair bit along the way...