Attempting control upgrade on my Novakon CNC mill

[Vixen]

Hi Kvom and Art

You may have a good point there regarding the Mesa card.

According to their documentation, the minimum requirement for LinuxCNC is only a slow a 0.4Ghz PC.

I am currently running LinuxCNC (the latest v 2.7 issue) on a 1.8Ghz PC with on-board video. I interface with the mill through the Paralleled Port. There is no Mesa card fitted. This arrangement has been working perfectly for the last four years. I conclude that the Mesa card is not essential to LinuxCNC.

Kvom have shown that PP is only a different GUI over the top of LinuxCNC. So I expected what works for LinuxCNC would also work for PP.

I understand the Tormach ship their systems with 2.4 Ghz PC's and a Mesa card. I am unsure if PP NEEDS a 2.4 Ghz PC, or if that speed is the standard speed for PC's in market place these days. I understand the Mesa card to be only acting as a buffer for the analog and digital signals and not adding processing power.

I have followed the instructions on the LinuxCNC forum to modify the PP software to operate with the Parallel Port instead of the Mesa card. As I say, it sort of works but the display is slow.

So, in truth,  I do not  know if my problem is with the speed of the PC or with the changes made to the PP software. I was trying to nail down the PC speed question first.

Thanks

Mike

[dieselpilot]

LinuxCNC is picky about graphics and mainboard chipsets and such. Everything in the PC changes realtime performance. If you go through the normal PC testing procedure you will find various things that are bogging the system. I've been running a mill on a Optiplex PIII 900Mhz for 8+ years, before that the same machine ran on a PIII 500. The Optiplex needed a separate video card to run well. Newer versions of Linux require a bit more power. I have a newer HP DC8000 SFF that runs excellent after a few tweaks and will eventually be used for a new system. Multiple cores and outrageous graphics cards don't necessarily mean a good Linuxcnc setup.

The stability of the PC is much less of a concern when a Mesa card is used. System performance comes into play when using parport stepping as realtime performance limits axis frequencies.

[kvom]

If you're running LinuxCNC via a parallel port anything I've contributed is moot.

[kvom]

I installed my latest version of the files, and now have a quite linear speed control of the spindle.  So I have buttoned it all up and am calling the conversion complete.