Ive always used my laptop with my openbuilds control. I got a bit sick of bringing into my workshop and while having a look in my attic found an old PC. Its running off Windows XP, still works so i thought id rig it up purely to run my CNC with Openbuilds on. Tried to download the software and its come up with only works with Windows 7 or later? Hows the easiest way to get it to run? Are all my settings in the Blackbox controller? If i do get it running do i have to set anything up or does it just plug and play? thanks
Actually 10 or 11. Even 7s been end of life for years Microsoft Windows. XP has been end of life for 16 years Yes stored in EEPROM on the microcontroller itself. Though hopefully you do have a backup (CONTROL > GRBL Settings tab > Backup Settings button) so you never need to worry about losing settings
I would load Xubuntu on the PC and run bCNC as the GUI, but then I'm a geek (-: If you are keen to try this, there is a little dance you have to do to get it to boot on old hardware. All modern OS's load GPT partition tables and EFI boot systems, but that old PC probably won't be able to boot off of GPT. So you have to force it to use an MBR partition table: (from memory: i have done this on 3 pcs recently, this weekend was a 20 year old HP laptop) 1 - boot off USB with Xubuntu 2 - DO NOT INSTALL YET 3 - under system menu run gparted 4 - remove all partitions from the HDD 5 - change the partition type to MSDOS 6 - exit gparted (note, you have not and must not create any partitions yet, just tell it the type of the partition table at this time) 7 - click the 'install' icon 8 - select manual partitions 9 - create a 512MB partition mounted on /boot 10 - create a 'ram size' partition as type 'swap', usually 4GB 12 - create a 'rest of disk' parittion mounted at / 13 - finish the rest of the install 14 - reboot and boot from the USB again 15 - open gparted and set the /boot partition flag to 'bootable' 16 - reboot without the usb and it should boot ok to the desktop. Installing bCNC is on the bCNC website, just follow those instructions.
