My Experience With EMC

After a long time of playing with EMC and figuring out how it works, I like it way better than TurboCNC. While TurboCNC was a good beginners choice that runs on almost any piece of hardware and easy to learn, EMC is far more configurable, has a more professional look and feel, and lets not forget totally free. In the last few weeks I've been working on settings for customizable controls to run small sections of G-code by the press of a button. I wanted my machine to automatically detect the top of my workpiece using a few simple lines of code. Automatic probe moves are much more fun than a feeler guage and the arrow key. Turns out It wasn't so easy though, as I didn't know much about EMC. My online inquiries attracted the attention of two talented individuals from the linux CNC wiki who were gratious enough to introduce me to classic ladder, a PLC language used for more complicated tasks. If your the adventurous sort you can try out my configuration files, but be careful as they still have a few bugs. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!! You can check out the details here as well as some other programs. Hopefully I can get a video up soon to clairify exactly what they do.

EMC was definately a steep learning curve but well worth the effort. It is very configurable for custom controls and routing physical input pins to virtually any function in EMC. It doesn't require very expensive hardware either, though I would recommend more than the minimum requirements which I just barely reached with my current setup. Most impressive is its ability to cater to a large range of setups including robotic arms. I always put off building one, but after what I've learned here, I think It'll make my todo list. I would love to hear any questions, comments, or ideas. If there's enough interest I might try expanding the usefullness of this type of function to include some other generally mundane repetative tasks.