Hello, I'm willing to buy a cnc router to make 3d art on wood to improve my business (for the last five years I've been doing manually with jigsaw and router), but is quite impossible to make my shapes 100% symetric; I've been researching what would be the best kit to purchase but I'm having some troubles to understand what is the best option for me. These are some information about my situation and intention: - Work with hard and soft wood; - I'm living in a van so I'm looking for something with 2x2ft working area; - 4 axis; - I use my laptop with Ubuntu, so it will be perfect if I can run linuxcnc; - Blender is the program that I'm creating the 3D images; - I tried to make one of my wood pieces using a deskcnc for metal, but it took over than 24 hours to finished. So I'm looking for something much faster (speceally because my living situation and the amount of batery that I can use for it); Sorry about my english - I'm still learning. Aloha
The OpenBuilds Sphinx 1050 (20" x 40") should be suitable to your situation. It only works half the area you seek but the work can easily be re-positioned to complete the piece. But the size will fit much better than a full size machine in your current studio situation. Two questions I have though regard the power supply and what you're expecting in the way of "4-axis". Ideally these systems need around 24V to operate properly. Do you have any way of providing this? As for 4 axis, are you wanting to include rotary?
Thank you for answering me Rick. Yes I do have a generator that provides 110V. I was researching and I think 3 axis will do fine for me. Is it possible to use ugs to send the gcode to the cnc l, or your machines came with another software?! Tks
You would need a dedicated PC to run LinuxCNC for this because it needs both the realtime kernel and a real parallel port. A much better (and smaller) solution is the BlackBox. The Blackbox does the realtime controlling and the GUI on the computer feeds it the Gcode. I use bCNC on my Linux machines for this but there are several GUI's for GRBL that run on Linux, including our very own OpenBuildsCONTROL .
David. It sounds like you might be able to help me! I'm trying to set up bCNC for use with the BlackBox. The real problem is my ignorance with regard to Linux. I need to run Linux on the PC because the motherboard does not support the more recent updates to Win10. Long story. So I am running Ubuntu 18-04.4 LTS. I followed the installation instructions for bCNC from GitHub as best I could. I have several issues: When running sudo pip install pyserial --upgrade as part of the installation I get the message The directory '/home/rob/.cache/pip/http' or its parent directory is not owned by the current user and the cache has been disabled. Please check the permissions and owner of that directory. If executing pip with sudo, you may want sudo's -H flag. The directory '/home/rob/.cache/pip' or its parent directory is not owned by the current user and caching wheels has been disabled. check the permissions and owner of that directory. If executing pip with sudo, you may want sudo's -H flag. I followed the directions and installed with sudo's -H flag but I don't know if I still have to address a permissions issue. Sometimes the bCNC window doesn't populate with all the contents as shown in the attached when launched from the Terminal with python -m bCNC. Strangely, sometimes these items do populate a while later on its own and I can connect and run the CNC. If I try to close the app before it populates the only option appears to be to kill the Python process in the System Monitor. I can't find online how to set up a shortcut so I can add it to my favourites and launch it without using Terminal.
if it works there is no problem (-: in the bCNC folder is a bCNC.sh shell script, you should run it using that rather than using python directly. right click the desktop and 'create a launcher' or similar language. and point it at the bCNC.sh script
Thanks for you reply! Sorry to be such a pain. During the install, a Terminal message tells me that bCNC is in "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages". There is a bCNC folder in there containing quite a few files named "bCNC" with different extensions. Unfortunately, there is no bCNC.sh. Is it somewhere else?
