Cant get plasma going

I built a simple 4' x 8' stepper driven table with Z and touch probe (24V nema 23's, ported out the trigger, arc ok, and reference torch voltage signals from the cutmaster 42, ref voltage going into MESA THCAD card) have everything wired up, and went to get linux going but have struggled to get a plasma gui actually running. I tried modifying the gmoccapy plasma files and when I would edit the files, most of the features of the gui were gone. I have tried the grotius files but editing the parport address alone will cause sequential errors in not finding joint.2.motor etc lines. I have gone through and retrofitted a bridgeport BOSS cnc so I got my feet wet with linuxcnc but struggling with plasma. Any help is appreciated

I suspect if you are seeing errors about joints it is because you are using version 2.7 not master branch (2.8).

Probably the quickest path to a working system for your hardware is JohnT's config and the THC component.
gnipsel.com/shop/machine-shop.xhtml

There are other builds evolving but none of them have morphed into a standard config.yet

Ok

First step[ is getting X, Y motion working correctly then add Z motion using jogs and MDI. Plasma control will come after these are working.
BTW if you only need the features of Phil's component it looks nice. I don't agree with the auto THC plan but no one has actually used it on a real machine to disprove my idea about it. Sorry I don't have time to test because we are in the middle of our holiday sales time.

John

I got to 2.8 (a linuxcnc dev folder is showing now). I tried bigjohnt files and keep running into the Error: could not insert module /usr/realtime-3.4-9-rtai-686-pae/modules/linuxcnc/hal_ppmc.ko: No such device.

What hardware do you have? The "...hal_ppmc.ko: No such device." complaint is basically about missing Pico Systems PPMC hardware, so the configuration file set you are attempting to run are setup for this hardware.