linuxcnc-uspace

About linuxcnc-uspace

From Debian's package description

LinuxCNC is a fully-realised CNC machine controller that can interpret machine-control programs (such as G-code), plan trajectories and finally output low-level signals to machine control hardware

LinuxCNC is modular and in principle the HAL (hardware abstraction layer), pluggable interpreters and variety of hardware drivers mean that it can control almost any software-defined physical system.

LinuxCNC relies on a realtime kernel to support real-time motion control, typically updating the position waypoints every 1mS and reacting to input within tens of microseconds.

Modules exist to use the low-level parts of LinuxCNC as a motion-control client for OpenPnP. Interfaces exist for ROS (the Robot Operating System) with which LinuxCNC has considerable overlap.

LinuxCNC supports arbitrary kinematics (the mapping between coordinate space and actuator space) and can control both parallel (eg Stewart platform) and serial (eg robot arm) systems in addition to conventional cartesian machine tools.

LinuxCNC supports 9 cartesian axes and 16 "Joints" (individual actuators) though the joint limit is build-time configurable.

A variety of interface hardware is supported including Modbus, EtherCAT, analogue +/-10V velocity control and Step/Dir. Step/Dir is supported by several hardware interfaces, including, but not limited to, the legacy Parallel Port.

A Hardware Abstraction Layer allows for great flexibility in signal mapping between the controller and the driver hardware. An extensive library of modules allow for complex signal processing within the HAL layer. For specialised tasks custom HAL components can be created using a C-like syntax and installed with the supplied tools.

By default LinuxCNC supports RS274 G-code but is extendable to parse other grammars such as STEP-NC or Gerber through support for pluggable interpreters.

If you want a computer to control things in the real world then LinuxCNC can do it. It is especially applicable to systems that are required to follow accurate paths described in cartesian space but has been used for numerous other applications.

This package provides the main package for LinuxCNC.

From Debian's description of the linuxcnc-uspace package, under that package's license.