Announcement : new fork "OpenCN"

I'm pleased to announce a new fork of LinuxCNC, called "OpenCN* :

OpenCN is an open source numerical control (CNC) for high end machining applications (high dynamics, high precision).

OpenCN is originally based on LinuxCNC, but with strong enhancements :

-) completely reworked trajectory planning (TP) including jerk control based on embedded optimization
-) Xenomai asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) for hard real time, low latency
-) up to date Linux kernel
-) EtherCat with 10 kHz frame rate and distributed clock (DC)
-) Qt based GUI

The HW platforms are x86 (available) and ARM (in preparation).

Software : gitlab.com/mecatronyx/opencnc/opencn
Doc : mecatronyx.gitlab.io/opencnc/doc/
Youtube : www.youtube.com/channel/UC8FQCu_fKYfK7QRDN0j_dBw


best regards,

Raoul Herzog

Sounds interesting, I will have to explore it as time allows.
Does it support other hardware interfaces besides ethercat? Such as Mesa or parallel port?
What are the minimum x86 hardware specs for the pc?
Any possibility of merging your ideas into Linuxcnc?

I would like to get a bit more information on how to install this to do some testing. I have downloaded all the available files but I'm not at all familiar the processes to make a working installation. How do you install it on a new never used computer? Some additional notes on this would be appreciated.

It took a lot of knowledge to develop this project yet there does not seem to be a lot of interest it it based on the lack of reply posts. So here are my thoughts.

1. Based on the demo the industry that this is designed for appear to use small very light weight machines.
2, Including matlab is likely to be a problem
3. Since most all G code is read from a file why not process the file prior to using it and incorporating the changes needed to round off or slow down approaching sudden changes of direction instead of trying to do this in real time.

I find that I'm primarily interested in the project's use of Capt'n proto in the remote gui and how that that could be applied to LinuxCnc itself to replace some of the old buffer and rcs code. This would be very worthwhile to making a pathway to a universal gui interface for LinuxCnc.

I really see no way that this can be merged into LinuxCnc "as is" due to the file structure being totally different than that of Linuxcnc itself. There really is little very little resemblance when doing a simple compare.

As I mentioned lot of thought and knowledge has gone into the development of this project but are all the changes it introduced really necessary to obtain the desired goal?.

Zero replies from thread creator so this project ....

Seems to come out of an engineering school. Maybe somebody's study project? The few contributors have probably moved on with their careers and the whole thing is likely to go the way of the dodo.
But nice of them to share it anyway.

It's made by researchers form here heig-vd.ch/rad/groupes-transversaux/mecatronyx which is a research group in the School of Engineering and Business Vaud in Switzerland.

It's looks quite nice. Just some documentation would be nice...

I really hope that Linuxcnc does not face the same fate as this project. Maybe opencn project found it's sponsors and become commersial.

I am constantly wondering how such a powerful project like Linuxcnc and it's forum can be so open and free of charge.

Looks like I was quite wrong about this being dead. While development isn't exactly going forward at a staggering speed there seems to be movement:

gitlab.com/mecatronyx/opencnc/opencn/activity

gitlab.com/mecatronyx/opencnc/opencn/-/wikis/home

As I understand there is jerk control built in but so far only 3 axis are supported. Also works only with EtherCAT drives.
Interestingly they seem to have no issue regarding licensing regarding EtherCAT in their Opensource project.

I was thinking about this branch when the subject of jerk limited control came up recently on the lcnc mailing list