[YZF]

I designed and built my own CNC router from scratch about 10 years ago. I just recently got it out to play with... Fun. But boy does it make a lot of dust to cut wood with a router (which is mostly why it's been sitting in the garage for so long, plus not a lot of time, plus it's not a very practical one, small work area).

EDIT: Random tidbit is that I control it from an old PC's parallel port. The PC runs DOS (the best real time OS ;) ) and uses some old free software called TurboCNC that can read G code and drive step and direction drivers. It has it's limitation but if you have an old PC around...

[mferraro89]

Very cool! A modern analogue might be LinuxCNC, which runs on old PCs in a realtime manner, generating pulses and sending them out the parallel port, or sending commands over ethernet to a dedicated step generator board for ultra accurate timing. What's old is new again!

[YZF]

I wanted to check it out at some point though I'm a little scared about the ability of Linux to pulse step and direction with the same precision of a 15 year old DOS setup that has no background tasks and just hits that timer interrupt with very predictable result... The motion generation capabilities of TurboCNC are pretty basic though.

Btw, if anyone is interested that build is documented here: https://www.cnczone.com/forums/diy-cnc-router-table-machines...

[craftinator]

I run LinuxCNC on a Raspberry Pi 4, and it works wonders. LinuxCNC is installed with a realtime Linux kernel; it'll run just as realtime as DOS.

[tabulatouch]

I tried as well but found no guides to build a RPi4 LinuxCNC machine with realtime. Can you point me to some tutorial or ready SD card image?

[craftinator]

I'll go through my saved links tonight. I remember it was a bit of a cludgy operation, like all things new+Linux, but after I got everything setup it all worked as expected.

I think this forum post pointed me in the right direction: https://www.forum.linuxcnc.org/18-computer/36879-raspberry-p...