Re: Lathe & Mill

[Ray Henry <rehenry-at-up.net>]

Hi Richard.

I don't believe that you can run multiple instances of the EMC on a 
single processor.  You could dedicate a single processor box to each 
machine and then run another doing the graphical interfaces to as many of 
them as you wish.

The launching of EMC with the correct personality for each machine is a 
trivial task.  You can set up as many different named run files that 
refer to different ini, tbl, var, and nml files as you want/need.  
Lathe1.run might start emc with the primary lathe personality while 
Mill1.run might start emc with the primary mill personality.

The EMC interpreter does not have any built in lathe routines but it can 
run an x,z and spindle device and create a gui for it.  At the moment, 
spindle control is open loop, servo driven, and a functioning version is 
sitting on Paul Corners workbench somewhere near Norwich England.  It 
hasn't been committed to sourceforge yet nor become a part of the BDI 
release process.  Matt Shaver has committed to showing a Sherline lathe 
doing single point threading at the North American Model Engineering 
Society show near Detroit in April next year. 

Your "trade" ( engineer, programmer ) should set you in good stead with 
Linux, real-time, and the EMC.  During my early days with the EMC, I had 
to build my own installs (Red Hat 5.0) and it was a painful and time 
consuming task.  These days it is much easier.  I recommend that you 
start by setting up an older PC as a stand alone box, use the BDI 2.18 CD 
or download it from http://www.yty.net/cnc/bdi.html and begin to play.   
You will soon see the light come on and you'll say, "oh that's how they 
do that."  A p5 100MHz or better is adequate for a first effort.  I'd 
recommend a 1020x768 monitor because anything less will allow some of the 
Kde and Gnome setup boxes tp hang off the bottom of the screen.  I hate 
guessing at which button, <ok>, <cancel>, or <???> the widget writer made 
default.

Your trade is also a good fit with the EMC because it is open source.  
When you see things that don't seem to work the way that you think they 
should, change them.  

Hope this helps.

Ray




On Wednesday 06 November 2002 06:40 am, you wrote:
> If I wanted to use EMC for both Lathe and Mill would it be
> possible to :
>
> 1) Run both at once by concurrent instances of EMC ?
> 2) Launch EMC correctly cofigured for either Lathe or Mill by
> parameter passing or script of some sort?
>
> Actually, on the subject of Lathes, does EMC actually support
> them?. I'm sure I've seen mention of it but can't see any
> support for a spindle encoder or threading.
>
> BTW, I know nothing about Linux I'm afraid other than a little
> playing with it under an emulator, but I am an
> engineer/programmer by trade.