Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Installing BDI

Wrathall Mark wrote:

> I'm a newbie who's been lurking for a month or so. I am building a practise
> CNC device, using Thorsten Ostermann's (www.nc-step.de) L297/298 stepper
> drive, optocoupler and PSU, and have been whirring some old used 5V 1A
> steppers with Kcam.
>
> A quick plug for NC-Step. I have little experience with soldering and
> electronics, and screwed up a fair bit, and Thorsten displayed impeccable
> customer service in helping troubleshoot and solve the mistakes I built in.
> He even sent me a free new design Optocoupler replacement set when he
> suspected that the old one had issues with weak signals from the MoBo. His
> prices are very reasonable and the boards are commercially produced. Highly
> recommended.
>
> I downloaded and burnt a BDI CD, and have a question with the installation.
>
> I don't get the machine picture when I boot the CD, just the text info
> screen. I can start installing, but get black screened at the graphic card
> installation (I assume, as it mentions SVGA mode or something just before
> black screening). Either the confuser locks up and must be rebooted, or it
> reboots itself.
>
> I tried the Red Hat hardware site, but it has no list for old 6.2
> compatiblity that I could find.
>
> Athlon XP1600
> ESI K7S6A MoBo (SIS 745 Chipset)
> 512Mb ram
> ATI Expert 2000 32Mb AGP
> 17Gb IBM IDE
> HP 9150 CD-RW
> Realtek Nic PCI
> Adaptek 2904 SCSI II PCI
> ALI 1394 Fire wire PCI
>
> I am trying to set up a treble boot WIN98SE on a 1Gb primary partiion,
> WIN2000PRO on a 3Gb primary Partition, and BDI on a 2 Gb primary partion.,
> the extended partion will be FAT32. Won't kill me to boot Linux from a
> floppy if I can't get the treble boot working.
>
> Is the ATI card the problem, and is there a workaround, other than replacing
> it?

ATI cards are notorious for problems, but it could be the Athlon CPU, too.
The BDI is not supposed to work on SCSI systems, but I guess your hard drive
is on the IDE, so that may not have anything to do with it. I don't know what you
mean about 6.2 - is that a reference to Red Hat 6.2? Earlier Linux kernels
definitely had problems with a number of non-Intel CPUs, I can't say for
certain when they had this fixed, I know Red hat 5.2 won't run on my
system with a Cyrix CPU.

You don't need a blazing fast cpu and 512 MB of memory to run EMC. I run
it on a 100 MHz pentium with 32 Mb memory and a 1 GB disk. You may want
a bit faster CPU for fast stepper systems with a high number of steps/inch.
It is a LOT easier to make all this work on a dedicated computer. Note that the
default BDI install wipes your entire hard drive!

Jon