Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] EMC2 requirements.

Lester Caine wrote:

>John Dammeyer wrote:
>
>
>>Hi everyone,
>>
>>I was house cleaning a bunch of older PCs I had lying around. Hooked up one that booted BDI EMC 2.12. That was way back in my "Let's play with CNC on a break out box" days. It's a Pentium 133, 8GB hard drive, 77MB RAM ISA and PCI bus.
>>
>>Does anyone know if this is too small for EMC2 for just playing around. I have a Smooth Stepper for MACH3 for the main CNC system but does EMC2 require that much more resources?
>>
>>
>I see Stephens reply, but rather than following that thread I think a
>different point needs to be made.
>LINUX will run fine on that machine - at least the LINUX that follows the same
>format as DOS and is not weighed down with tons of useless crap. ( Now that
>DOES make a good boat anchor ;) )
>
>

Heh - point taken :)

>Many people are still running the Taig's on MPS2000 and MPS2003 which fits on
>a floppy disk and just needs a tidy version of DOS to run. While the list of
>supported Gcode tags is not large it does the job perfectly - day in and day out.
>
>

I'm sure TurboCNC would be very happy with that machine as well. Also,
if you can get hold of it, Artisan CNC (what Ah-ha used to sell) runs
great on a 386 machine, so a P133 would be copiously overpowered.

What these controllers don't give you is the ability to network (and
lots of other stuff we don't care about, like sound), and the ability to
multitask. With EMC2, you can have an editor open with the G-code, make
some edits and reload until the preview looks good (or, if you use
CAD/CAM, those programs can be running while EMC2 is running). Though
it isn't required, it sure is convenient to be able to do other things
while the machine is running a part.

>Co-processors such as Smooth Stepper are little more than control computers
>which the smaller PC's that we all have sitting on the shelf could just as
>easily handle. So perhaps there is a place for a 'cut down' version of EMC2
>that can run on a core only version of Linux? This would work as a machine
>controller which is FED information from other machines ...
>
>

Actually, you don't have to go that far. The basic EMC2 system can run
on a very very "small" computer. It's the bells-and-whistles 3D preview
GUI and other jazzy stuff that takes all the horsepower. The thing is,
most people look at the cool stuff when choosing a controller, not the
quality or features of the controller itself. (I have a friend who
chose Mach3 simply because there were more screenshots on the Mach
website than there are on the LinuxCNC website) If you want to take a
little time, you can probably install the server version of Ubuntu
(maybe even on a 256M machine), then install EMC2+the realtime kernel
from the precompiled packages. At that point, you would need to edit
the startup files to change the default bootup to a text mode console.
There are still one or two user interfaces for EMC2 that use text mode,
keystick one of them. You can make a script (read: batch file) to run
EMC2, and as long as you have keystick chosen as your user interface, X
windows never needs to run. There's also a telnet-like client - I think
you can use a terminal program like HyperTerminal to interact with the
machine, though that one doesn't have a UI per se - there wouldn't be a
DRO or anything. You can also use a networked machine to provide the
GUI in several other ways.

It wouldn't be easy to configure that computer to run EMC2 as a machine
controller, but it probably is possible. Oh, and I agree - I'd like to
see a "small/embedded" version of EMC2, I just haven't had the time to
make it and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have the time to maintain it, so
I haven't done it yet.

- Steve