Saturday 20 October 2018


The Adventures getting a 3040T CNC Router work

So I just purchased a 3040T CNC Router with 200W spindle. I've always intended to not use the supplied software and hardware but to change these in stages. My main aim is to use a Beagelboard or something like this running LinuxCNC plus change the hardware over to a smoothieboard


At present the board I'm after has not been released (v2 pro), the main reason for wanting to use one of these is that it uses the TMC2660 .These have SafeGuard functionality which should be able to auto detect the height of the material during the setup phase before routing commences. 

The story so far, I order the version of router with the parallel port, which was a big mistake. The parallel port is not actually a parallel port but a GPIO port. The machine did come with a Plant CNC parallel port to usb cable and some what I will call dodgy software. So, I decided to use a GigaBox that I order a few years ago for a client but was never used. This is a P9000 with 8G ram and 240G SSD drive.

This didn’t go the way I expected the distro for LinuxCNC didn’t have the wifi driver, so I went back to basics and tried Mint Linux 19. As Linux CNC can be setup to use Mint. This didn’t work as Mint 19 had issues with the first step in the guide

So, I rebuilt the machine again with Mint 18.1, I managed to get everything installed using Method  3. But after restarting the machine a second time the system seem to have lost the passwords and I could no longer login to the GUI. Let alone get to the point of trying to control the Router.


So, I decide to jump to the stage I was going to do and that is to run the Router via the Beaglebone Black Wireless. 

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