THC using DAC & HAL

fungus wrote: I had actually run across THCAD, and the approach is very interesting; I might give that a shot. I didn't get one due to the fact that my power supply has no low voltage out, and the peak voltage is 340V. I could have hooked the 0-10V version up to my hacked-in voltage divider, but I really want to gain more experience with getting analog values into LinuxCNC. PCW's artwork is fantastic, but I can't help but tinker with this stuff. I would like to tinker with torque-mode servo control in the future, and this is a decent stepping stone.

As for PlasmaC, it seems interesting, but did not seem to gain much ground for the extra effort. I could be entirely missing the point (as I have never used a CNC plasma myself). My intention was simply to use a 4-axis configuration (I have a servo Z as well as a 4th axis for tube) and a custom component to manage the torch height. I have a router attachment for this as well, which I was planning to handle under the same config; I could split it into a plasma config and a mill config though.

Tommy, you must drink fancier coffee than I do

The THCAD-10 can handle overvoltage to 500 volts indefinitely and can be scaled to any full scale reading you want with a handful of resistors.

I would strongly recommend you go with Plasmac. Without fail I think everybody here who was doing plasma before plasmac was released has adopted it. But along the way all of our collective learnings has been rolled into plasmac which is why it is so good.