Modified X-Carve and Custom 4-Axis CNC Controller

Here is my fully customized X-Carve!
I originally bought it in 2015 but I didn’t do much with it during College. Fast-forward to 2017, I found myself wanting a machine capable of handling demanding production run, better 3D carving, and to do it all on an Open Source platform as to make future expansions possible.

I quickly ditched the TinyG GRBL shield w/Arduino Uno and pick up some control cards from Mesa, specifically the 7i76/5i25 card combo.

With Mesa cards, you need to run LinuxCNC or MachineKit to talk to the FPGA controlling the CNC. so I download a 32-bit kernel of Linux (Wheezy 2.7.14) to an older dual core Pentium II PC with a trivial amount of RAM.
and got started.

If you’re venturing down this route yourself, you should know that LinuxCNC is VERY picky about the computer hardware you’re running. I’m no expect on the reasoning for this, so my advice would be to learn what’s right for you by reading through all the forum posts on linuxcnc.org. But for what it’s worth, I’d say that you should pay special attention to all the information about GPU compatibility, remember to disable all of your computer’s power saving features, and to start working with a computer that has only the bare essentials in it – you don’t want to be bashing your head against a wall for three weeks because you didn’t notice how the after-market sound card was trashing your latency numbers.

With my warning out of the way, we can move on! Check out where things are at on my build –