Re: Re: Re: EMC: why do I have so many problems?
Posted by
Ray
on 2001-10-14 10:47:48 UTC
Les (comments mixed in)
pc's and made loop routines -- like virtual bar feed with a long bar --
and run programs over night. At 2 min/part I've seen it run a couple
hundred and still be going when I shut it down. This is with BDI-2.10, my
own gui, minimill values and steppers. If you have a 2-04 you can update
using the links Paul recently posted and get the same system.
I need to give just a bit of my own history here. I showed my EMC setup
using RedHat 5.2 at NAMES in 2000. I'd been hanging around it for about
four months then. And I crashed it several times. I am amazed at how
far it has grown since then. And this list also. I met Bill (listmom)
there and if memory serves, he said we had just passed the 400 mark -- or
was it 200.
We had some really stubborn bugs in the system. Ian found several of
them. I think that he was about ready to call himself the Orkin man. (A
US company that sprays for insects) The real killer was the stack or
buffer overruns because some PC's got it all the time and some got it once
in a while and some almost never. And it was the kind of bug that was
hard to track and pin down 'cause you'd get it, do almost anything, and it
would go away for a bit. This carried over to BDI-2.04 but is fixable
with two downloads (emc and rcslib) that Paul has placed on the
linuxcnc.org site.
All three of my PC's were out of commission with it at NAMES this year. I
had moments thinking that we were approaching the "microjunk" quality and
was headed for the bar. Fortunately I had some good friends there and met
some new ones that kept me going. The possibilities are endless with open
source.
woodworking. You need very high feedrates and high torque or you wind up
with very short tool life.
I don't have one running here but have heard rumors of them being used in
a number of places. You would do well to post this same question on the
emc@... list. But I'll try to give you some encouragement for the
EMC/STG combination.
Don McLane from STG is maintaining the linuxcnc.org page about STG and EMC
so this will guarantee a group of folk to handle most any problem you
might encounter. STG-III using PCI has passed the concept and prototype
stage stage and will soon be available.
Overnight I got a big post from a fellow in Stuttgart Germany who has just
gotten his tabletop hexapod running with Maxon servos and STG-II. He has
had a stepper version running for a couple months. You can see them at
http://www.isw.uni-stuttgart.de/personen/t_franit/primodell/
if you click on the flag at the bottom of left frame, you can read them in
English. Model II has the servos and STG.
And don't forget the servo/encoder boards that Jon Elson is developing.
Both the servo and stepper versions ran at names. I've got the servo
version here and plan a new round of tests with it in the next week or two.
HTH
Ray
> From: "Les Watts" <leswatts@...>My basement is not exactly a world class testing lab but I've set up some
> > Bug 3. This one is a biggie -- though not nearly as big as any one of
> > the windows oss from some commercial companies. The real-time
> > extensions WILL cause the system to crash.
>
> Ray,
>
> Would you consider the current real-time linux/EMC to be stable enough
> to be viable in a commercial environment?
>
> I can handle an occasional crash but not a system that would lock up
> every time I used it.
pc's and made loop routines -- like virtual bar feed with a long bar --
and run programs over night. At 2 min/part I've seen it run a couple
hundred and still be going when I shut it down. This is with BDI-2.10, my
own gui, minimill values and steppers. If you have a 2-04 you can update
using the links Paul recently posted and get the same system.
I need to give just a bit of my own history here. I showed my EMC setup
using RedHat 5.2 at NAMES in 2000. I'd been hanging around it for about
four months then. And I crashed it several times. I am amazed at how
far it has grown since then. And this list also. I met Bill (listmom)
there and if memory serves, he said we had just passed the 400 mark -- or
was it 200.
We had some really stubborn bugs in the system. Ian found several of
them. I think that he was about ready to call himself the Orkin man. (A
US company that sprays for insects) The real killer was the stack or
buffer overruns because some PC's got it all the time and some got it once
in a while and some almost never. And it was the kind of bug that was
hard to track and pin down 'cause you'd get it, do almost anything, and it
would go away for a bit. This carried over to BDI-2.04 but is fixable
with two downloads (emc and rcslib) that Paul has placed on the
linuxcnc.org site.
All three of my PC's were out of commission with it at NAMES this year. I
had moments thinking that we were approaching the "microjunk" quality and
was headed for the bar. Fortunately I had some good friends there and met
some new ones that kept me going. The possibilities are endless with open
source.
> Oh, another thing on my mind... is the stg2 driver stable? (i.e.I can appreciate your interest in servos rather than steppers for
> being used to make parts)
woodworking. You need very high feedrates and high torque or you wind up
with very short tool life.
I don't have one running here but have heard rumors of them being used in
a number of places. You would do well to post this same question on the
emc@... list. But I'll try to give you some encouragement for the
EMC/STG combination.
Don McLane from STG is maintaining the linuxcnc.org page about STG and EMC
so this will guarantee a group of folk to handle most any problem you
might encounter. STG-III using PCI has passed the concept and prototype
stage stage and will soon be available.
Overnight I got a big post from a fellow in Stuttgart Germany who has just
gotten his tabletop hexapod running with Maxon servos and STG-II. He has
had a stepper version running for a couple months. You can see them at
http://www.isw.uni-stuttgart.de/personen/t_franit/primodell/
if you click on the flag at the bottom of left frame, you can read them in
English. Model II has the servos and STG.
And don't forget the servo/encoder boards that Jon Elson is developing.
Both the servo and stepper versions ran at names. I've got the servo
version here and plan a new round of tests with it in the next week or two.
HTH
Ray