[Noisebridge-discuss] getting that goddamned mill to work

[Jonathan Foote]

Waitaminit, I thought we was leet hakerz! Looking at the linuxcnc
setup, it's pretty straightforward to interface with a parallel port
if we can find the stepper and encoder signals.

http://www.distinctperspectives.com/emc2installsetup/page4.html

I've done that before on another project and it went pretty well:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/headrotor/3549404637/in/photostream/

If I have permission to poke at the mill controller boards I can take
a look tonight.

Someone want to find a PC with a serial port and install the linuxcnc
ubuntu image?


On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 2:39 PM, Tom Longson (nym) <tomlong at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's another $20 + 2, only 10 more people donating $20 will get this thing
> working. Once we have something working, someone can reverse engineer the
> fucker I imagine, making a Linux driver more likely.
> Cheers,
> Tom Longson (nym)
>
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Ani Niow <v at oneletterwonder.com> wrote:
>>
>> In the shop we have a small blue CNC only mill that would be wonderful for
>> making custom circuit boards and machining small metal parts. No one has
>> been able to figure out how to run it however. A group of us tried getting
>> LinuxCNC (http://linuxcnc.org/) to connect to it but the trouble is it
>> doesn't support the controller used in the mill. Wish we had figured that
>> out earlier before spending so much time on it. The only other option was
>> using a DOS based program that came on floppy disks. After hours of trying
>> to get FreeDOS to even install, people gave up.
>> Been doing some research on it and it seems that the official DOS software
>> has been replaced by a much improved Windows version with some neat
>> features. It's not free though and is not cheap either at $242
>> (http://www.shop.maxnc.com/product.sc?productId=23&categoryId=8).
>> As I see it there's three options on getting this running.
>>
>> Fuck with the DOS version enough (which likely is hard to use with a
>> horrid UI, not to mention it's fucking DOS) to get it working
>> Write a driver to support the controller inside the mill or replace the
>> controller to make LinuxCNC work
>> Suck it up and buy the Windows software
>>
>> Given it's a $2,500 machine that was donated to us, $242 seems like small
>> change. I'm sure people have religious reasons for not running Windows and
>> by all means don't use the mill because of it or write a Linux driver for
>> it. Until that happens I would absolutely love to figure out how to use a
>> CNC mill.
>> I'm willing to gather pledges and get the software, alternatively if
>> anyone knows where we can get it for free (maybe someone else with the same
>> machine) then please go for it. Do-ocracy and all.
>> Until then, I'm pledging $20 to The Software For the Mill Fund.
>>
>> -Ani
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
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