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.
The design files can be found by going to my GrabCad and Thingiverse pages –
- https://grabcad.com/library/3-4-axis-cnc-electronics-enclosure-1
- https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2756470
The bill of materials is listed below –
If you’re considering this upgrade, you should know that LinuxCNC is VERY picky about the computer hardware you run it on.
My advice advice to you would be to go read through all the forum posts on linuxcnc.org.
Pay special attention to all the information about GPU compatibility. Also, disable your computer’s power saving features and start with a computer that has only the bare essentials in it.
Getting stuck for three weeks because you didn’t notice how the after-market sound card was trashing your latency numbers isn’t a good time.
I hope you enjoyed this article. If you have any questions about my X-Carve or LinuxCNC, you can comment here or email me, and I’ll do my best to help!