I didn't even load the video card software, just left the generic vid driver that the machine booted up with. You also have to turn off all sleep modes, screen savers, power savers. IOW, no internet connection, no other software, nothing. The money went to help pay off the 770.Īlso when you set up the computer make the software as bare bones as possible. I saved $400 to $500 on the DIY Mach3 controller and anticipate the same on the DIY PathPilot. providers of personal small CNC machines, CNC tooling, and many more CNC items.Īlso note that although Tormach states the PathPilot upgrade is only for people that previously bought a Tormach controller they will sell it to you anyway if you have one of their machines. The new manuals with chapters on PathPilot are online here, pages 29,30 of the 770 manual shows the connections on the Tormach PathPilot controller. With the DIY Mach3 controller you had to provide your own OP system and configure the software, I think with the Tormach PathPilot CD all that is already done. I'm going to build a PathPilot machine also and it will be following the recommended hardware. I've already built a Mach3 controller and I didn't even exactly follow Tormach's recommendations, I'm using a SSD harddrive.

Depending on configuration you may also want a USB PCI card for the keyboard/mouse connections. You also need a Mesa PCI (or PCIe) card for the parallel port that connects to the mill, Tormach says you can't use the one embedded on the MB. I would use components that Tormach has approved in this document The configuration is a MESA 6i25 + 7i77 running closed loop +- 10V servos in torque mode. In addition I designed a interface, iBOB2, which contains 1 SATA and 1 PCIe x1 interface. I re-programmed and flashed the bios to activate the PCIe bus.

In the process of reconfiguring PathPilot.

What have your experiences been? Am I dramatically underestimating the amount of work involved? If you decided to build your own, do you now wish you had bought it off the rack? What did you buy with the money you saved? Beer and smokes? I'm thinking a Haimer.īenuks I have PathPilot running on a AMD Gizmosphere 1. I'd probably use a ~5 year old Dell Optiplex with a Core 2 Duo processor. I've used Linux pretty extensively, but I'm no systems administrator. I don't mind fiddling a bit to save some cash. I'm trying to assess the potential pitfalls of going this route. From what I've been reading it seems very doable to take an existing PC, order the PathPilot upgrade kit (35458), and cobble together my own controller.

What cnc controler type is pathpilot