[Noisebridge-discuss] getting that goddamned mill to work

[seph]

Hi all, I'm a boston person. I've been lurking, and love the idea. If I
ever make it back to SF, I'll visit. Meanwhile:

Ani Niow <v at oneletterwonder.com> writes:

> 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.

I assume this is a MaxNC OL mill? I just dealt with this.

They work okay, the mill itself isn't great, but hey they work.

I don't know what controller you have, but the one I have is pretty
cheap. It's a kinda cruddy board, with a bunch of transistors on
it. It's got a parallel port on it, and a pretty straightforward wiring
setup.

You can get emc2 to work with it. It's just that all the emc2 examples
are for step+direction controllers, where this is a
wavedrive/phasedrive/whatever you want to call it. Totally works, but
took me forever to figure out. HAL is powerful, but baroque.

I suspect it's fastest to use emc2, though if your motivated, there are
lots of interesting upgrade paths. (Replacing the spindle motor, the
steppers, the controller...)

Anyhow, since I don't have a blog, I've dumped a gif with the pinout,
and my emc2 configs up at
http://www.directionless.org/tmp/maxnc/maxnc10ol/

have fun

seph