[Noisebridge-discuss] getting that goddamned mill to work

Mitch Altman maltman23 at hotmail.com
Tue Sep 29 01:04:18 UTC 2009


I have a copy of DOS 6.22 that works great.  Will that work?

 

 

Mitch.

 

 


 





 

From: v at oneletterwonder.com
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:26:15 -0700
To: noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
Subject: [Noisebridge-discuss] getting that goddamned mill to work

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Been doing some research on it and it seems that the official DOS software has been replaced by a much improved Windows version with some neat features.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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