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

My experience with my industrial CNC plasma table I designed and built is as follows,
 

• I would not recommend a water table for a machine that is used in heavy plate production as slag build up on the slats causes them to need frequent cleaning.
  
   
  
  
   
  
  • I tried multiple solutions to remove the top layer of slag but in heavy use it is only temporary.
  • In the end we ended up just replacing the slats every couple of months as the labor cost to remove and clean them far out-weighted the cost of replacement.
  • When I first built the machine, I incorporated slat mounts into the machine frame but as soon as we started using it for heavy production, we found it very hard to remove the slats to clean them. I rebuilt the slat support mounts and built removeable frames the slats mounted into. We would then crane the thee slat sections out with a forklift every other week to clean out the massive about of metal slag.
  • I was lucky enough that a fire hose reel was positioned near the machine to keep the water level topped up, but after I left the company, my replacement foreman experimented with different water level heights and found that for the air pressure of the Hypertherm Powermax 125 we are using, the water does not need to be at the top of the slats to remove the plasma smoke from the air.
  • I built a large under-table custom water storage tank and had it hot dipped galvanized. I found it very crucial to have a water storage tank to drain the water so the slag can be shoveled out. I spent many hours some days shoveling out slag into a large recycling bin and in heavy use the slag is heavier that concrete.
  • My next table will be a down-draft table as I have seen post on the forum showing how a baffle system can be use to reduce the required air flow suction to safety remove the plasma smoke.
  • I brought a refractometer to keep and eye on the plasma water solution concentration, but found that as long as I keep the water level stable and added trace amounts of plasma water table fluid, rust was mostly non-existent 
    
     
    
    
    
    
    I hope this helps someone as I learnt everything the hard way multple times.

  Well tommylight  I think the things shortly going in the positive direction was to distract people and hope it would
all die back down so they could return to screwing everyone over again. Really this is what happens when 
governments are run like a business.
   This is also what happens when legal is confused with ethical. 

machine progress has been going slowly but steadily

i used it for its first job today

Job for the local drilling rig  large hunk of aluminium 300mm dia and 600mm long ish machined like 90 percent of it away in the big blue cnc lathe

then i used the FIl to machine a curve on the end and finally i used a smaller cnc mill to machine a big slot in it.

all machines run linuxcnc  and they all just work with no issues

the Fil was accurate as with the linear scale.  that's awesome

needed the FIL cnc as my other cnc mills didn't have enough z height.

 

machine worked nicely though it only has a top speed of 1800 rpm.  I am used to 10000 rpm on the standard smaller cnc machines

cheers

just tried all that again, no luck. I did get a new message this time asking if I would like to force UEFI setup. But still failed at grub install.

QtDragon doesn't steer the oword/mdi path searches.
It does a check to see if the oword is path is valid from the info in the INI.
But even if the path isn't valid, it still passes it to linuxcnc's motion controller.

linuxcnc searches in this order:
[DISPLAY] PROGRAM_PREFIX
[RS274]SUBROUTINE_PATH
[RS274]USER_M_PATH

The 'File not open' error is from the motion controller not Qtdragon.
Maybe Qtdragon is polluting the command, but i can't know that without more information - like the debugging code I spoke about above.

As for docs...
What do you suggest I could add to this?:
linuxcnc.org/docs/devel/html/gui/qtdragon.html#sec:bridge

Chris

It is plugged in and at that part of the setup there is no issues. Maybe I will try live and make sure.

I dont know what else to try. I had linuxcnc running but decided to do a fresh install to the newest. I have spent all day enabling csm, disabling csm. made a bootable usb with rufus, then tried making it one UBUNTU. No success. UEFI says grub efi amd64 package failed.  trying legacy install results in something wrong with the screen resolution and unable to read the screen so i installed a video card which fixed that problem.

legacy gives me the error grub pc package failed to install. what else can I try. B550 motherboard and ryzen 5 cpu.

I’m trying to tune my eethercat lichuan a5 servos but I’m getting around 0.02mm ferror instantly regardless the speed which then quickly drops to a couple microns steady. Can you recommend a way to fix it or is it ok as is?

I posted the question on the linuxcnc channel on the PrintNC Discord server too, and mikemacwillie pointed out the problem in my FlexiHAL-config.txt file. The Y limit input was inverted, so the machine thought it was already triggered when the carriage was nowhere near.

After changing it from True to False, I also had to revise the HOME and HOME_OFFSET parameters, as I interpreted them incorrectly.

Please, see my correct config files attached.

  

Ich arbeite gerade an eine ähnliches (aboer komplizierteres) Problem auf meine Schaublin Drehmaschine.

Als nicht programmierem habe ich mich auch von Comps gedruckt. Aber als schlechte Programmiere, mache ich es mit Unterstützung von Claude KI. Ein Comp to Komplieren is sehr einfach.

Das wichtigste ist die Aufstellung die Requirements:
Welche Ausgange gibt es, Welche sind Analog, welche digital. 
Welche Eingänge gibt es. Hat der 500W ein Spindle encoder? Getriebe positions Schalter?
Wird das Motor Open loop oder closed loop gesteuert?
Welche Inhibits braucht es? Gangwechsel lediglich beim Stillstand?
Muss der Spindle beim Gangwechel hin und her Oszillierien wie meine 400E?

Ich habe damals alles über der MAHO 400E Getriebe hier zusammengetragen.
github.com/jin-eld/mh400e-linuxcnc/wiki/...Gearbox--Description .
... dann eine Flowchart erzeugt.
github.com/jin-eld/mh400e-linuxcnc/commi...aed6b81e0642696bc8e1

Ein Freund hat es damals in zwei Durchgänge schon fertig programmiert gehabt. Mit eine ähnliche "Leistungsheft" wird KI es auch.