Alternative to PC based Cnc controllers

John. The manual I saw may not be up to date with the functions available in the current software version out in the wild.

The point I'm making is for anyone thinking of moving from Mach3 or LinuxCNC to be aware of missing functions they may be accustomed to having.

The point you make of needing to buy the £400 unit to get features in Mach3 & LinuxCNC puts things more in perspective.

Martin.

I have not seen a price for the NEW990TDb linked to in the post by John S on 11 Sep but the manual is available in PDF format here. **LINK**

This lists the codes it accepts which include G76 threading.

Martin

312 quid + 91 quid fedex plus vat and handling charges in the UK

500 quid should just about cover it

990TDB at aliexpress

That Aliexpress link not working for me - let's see if this works: here for lathe version and here for a mill.

EDIT - they're a bit more pricey than the one Martin found... but they have English on the buttons...

Edited By Bikepete on 16/09/2016 18:09:01

Deal direct with Newkye.

**************************************************************

Foreign trade manager
Taizhou Newkye Electronics CO.,LTD
www.newkye.com

*****************************************

So at the time this worked out to £720 UKP then £15 handling and £88 duty to be paid on two units.

As I was able claim the £88 back, this worked out to £367.50

Today's prices may be different because of the exchange rate.

This is for a commercial unit that handles all common G Code that Mach and Linux can handle plus many more specialised ones. Can handle steppers and servo's, spindle off / on and speed. Screw cutting and tool changer without needing any external control cards or third party support, or from past experience third world support.

The first of these units has been fitted to a Denford Orac and is running test code at the moment.

This is it's first thread straight out of the box.

Something we have waited years for a thread that works and a decent GUI.

Edited By John Stevenson on 16/09/2016 20:03:03

Is that right for modern electronics Bazyle? Thirty years ago I would have agreed wholeheartedly but failure rates have been falling for decades. (Total rubbish, bleeding edge and exploding batteries apart!)

0.5% sounds a reasonable rate for first time failures, but thereafter I think the average failure rate for electronics drops for a few years before rising again as the components age. Mechanical things like switches tend to fail first. The electronics I own has all been very reliable, certainly not failing at 7% per year, thank goodness.

The prices John is quoting are close to the point where I start to see these magic boxes as disposable, not unlike the cheap digital radio I have in my workshop.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 16/09/2016 21:06:33

I also question the 7% failure rate.

Closest thing I can envision in a workshop is a DRO, proper commercial one and not the simple remote scale type.

I have had DRO's now since 1980, so 36 years. The early Heidenhain type have long gone together with the machines they were fitted to but you still see them today. I never personally had a display fault on any of these. Two faulty scales cause by age, crap and corruption. The current set of DRO's which are still not that dated, date back from about 2000.

Sino's, Onxy and Eassons, no problems with displays but have had a lathe cross slide scale go down after about 8 years and incidentally these are every day commercial machines, not hobby.

£400 for a commercial controller is peanuts. You couldn't get a Fanuc engineer on site for that money.

But the cheaper units which are more hobby mill and router style are around the £140 to £170 depending on where you buy from.

Price of a cheap PC ?

Yes, that failure rate is daft, although if you buy VWs or Dysons you might think otherwise. There's not a lot in those controllers and they are mostly mature technology if you look inside the box.

The last product I launched (this one) was achieving 99.5% FPY (end of line failures) within 6 months of launch and field failure rates in the 100s of PPM over the first few years, despite being made in China. It had to be reliable and well manufactured, as it isn't possible to repair it and it has an 8 year warranty life, so any failure makes it scrap. It had a pleasingly adverse impact on the "made in USA" competition...

True, you can buy utter crap anywhere in the world but 7% failures would put you out of business before you even got into it.

I'm having one of these on my to me! Xmas pressy list, it looks a no brainer, I need 4 axis mill to start with, this will replace Mach on the Hurco, but I might go for the lathe one as well, then look around for a lathe to convert.

Has a group buy ever been done on this forum?!

Shaun

> Dysons

The customer service is excellent, when we had a Dyson they were always happily sending us replacement parts!

That said the SO has a small portable Dyson Vac and that does seem to be a bit more robust, unlike the earlier models.

Neil

this is a bit unfair. I know of a hand full of situations that you are describing. The developers of linuxcnc do it as a hobby. They work on bits that they are interested in. Simple as that. To come in and demand something be done isn't going to get you very far. One of the developers gave this link as an example of understanding open source development.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/09/msg00453.html

in another post you said Mach/linuxcnc needs expensive hardware to work like the dedicated control. (Rigid tapping, threading...).

linuxcnc will do these things with only the printer port. If you need something faster than the printer port then a whopping 89us will get you a pci or ethernet external hardware. (2 printer ports worth and expendable). For about 200us you get a 5 axis stepper Bob with spindle encoder interface + analog out, 48 i/O and also expandable. The control interface options are almost limitless (and very inexpensive).

Linuxcnc is a mature cnc control software that is actively developed. Stable and flexible. If you apply a bit of elbow grease and invest a bit of time - linuxcnc won't let you down.

Sam

Edited By sam sokolik on 20/09/2016 04:25:24

The reliability figure was based on an MTBF of 125k hours which is pretty good these days for the equivalent of a TV so maybe a little controller will do better. The PSU can be a let down and is often a saving with that toy widget or usb hub but may have only 50k hours while a decent one with 250k MTBF will cost 3x more. MTBF is based on the MIL spec so assumes you repair it, disposables work out worse. Even at 7% you still have some of your units that have never failed after 10 years. I still have a lot of stuff hanging on with customers after 16 years - bit of a nuisance as we want them to upgrade.

Dysons with one moving part don't compare. How is your Sky box and VCR shaping up?

Sam,

I'll have to reply in full to this tonight as going out at the moment but let me say I'm not trying to knock LinuxCNC. It does work and works very well but only for 1% of the uses who understand it to set it up.

Reply in full later.

@Sam,

I agree with what you are saying, however, you are kind of missing John's point.

Yes, you can pick up a 'scrap' PC, monitor and keyboard, install LinuxCNC or Mach3, but that all requires come computer 'savvy' that not everyone has, and even many that do, can't be bothered to spend the time and effort.

Not every PC works well with LinuxCNC, and it is a bit of a 'suck it and see' aproach to find one that gives low latency figures, older machines often being better than newer ones.

I can easily see why many people opt for Mach3 over LinuxCNC, due to more familiarity with Windows, but it still involves installing an OS, an application and configuring that application, which is not always the simplest thing in the world.

I have currently decided to go with LinuxCNC, since I have 20+ years of Unix experience, however, I would say that my journey has been far from plain sailing and many would have thrown the towel in ages ago.

The appeal of the units John is talking about is that for around £150.00, you coud have a ready made solution, hook up your steppers, drivers and PSU and off you go, for many, the time saving and simplicity alone is worth the cost.

For £400.00 you can have a commercial unit that can do pretty much anything you could ever want, tool changer, coolant, threading, etc, etc, that could take you months to configure in Mach3 or LinuxCNC, all in a unit about the size of a DRO! - I am still struggling to persuade LinuxCNC to recognise my second parallel card! The OS sees it, stepconf sees it, but you start the main app and it refuses to play - oh the joys of cobbling together a system with parts that may or may not be completely supported.

If you want more than a basic setup with Mach3, you are probably looking at a smooth stepper unit, and with LinuxCNC, Mesa boards, both of which start significantly adding to the cost and complexity of your setup, at which point an all in one box starts to look very attractive.

I don't think you need worry too much Sam, John's critique of Linux is directed at the voluntary developer end of the spectrum.

Actually, because linux is open source it has very considerable appeal to the scientific and embedded software communities. In the case of these CNC controllers, the innards are almost certainly based on linux as the operating system, and it's not unlikely that the application is a commercial adaptation of an open source CNC development. It's common for improvements made by commercial developers to eventually find their way back into the open source base. It's also possible that the software was developed from scratch - we don't know.

At the moment:

• super-computers are far more likely to be running a Linux OS than anything else.
• Difficult to know exactly but perhaps 60% of all Servers are running some sort of UNIX (Commercial or Linux).
• The majority of Desktops are Microsoft with Apple in the rear. (I say this with regret as I write this with Firefox and Ubuntu, but most people don't like learning new tricks.)
• The majority of embedded computing is Linux based. Things like routers, NAS, smart TV, mobile phones, entertainment centres, SatNavs, games, toys, avionics, SDR, and controllers of all sorts. The flexibility of open source software is highly advantageous in the world of embedded computing, which is where the money is these days.

John is a professional engineer. As such I would expect him to focus on the usability of any product that's intended for sale. In an ideal world, the customer shouldn't have to worry about what's inside the box. It should just work, be supported, and above all be affordable. Linux and open source software is well placed to enable all that, but most people wouldn't want to have to do the enabling themselves.

Cheers,

Dave

Might be worth starting a discussion with JS.

Neil

True, they last for weeks!

The problem with all opensource is that it is led by the developers, not the users because there are no 'customers'.

It's just like this forum - if people had to pay to use it we would have had to upgrade the software years ago.

I had a recent problem with Firefox - it decided it had a slow start and told me I should 'refresh it'. An ambiguously worded page didn't explain I would lose all my settings as 'refresh' is essentially a shortcut to a vanilla install. It took me a good while and some fiddling to get my settings back and many ordinary folk would have had no luck at all.

Reporting this, most people want to help by offering me links to things that would help me restore my settings. Not one person has responded to my repeated request that they preface the refresh suggestion with a clearer explanation of what will happen and less drastic ways of speeding up firefox and add a simple 'restore old profile' button somewhere. This is despite several of the acknowledging that refresh causes a lot of people problems, although it is useful when firefox gets completely stuffed and someone inexperienced needs an easy way out.

Neil