Re: What is the best THC system
Its interesting to see a number of commercial hardware solutions mentioned as possible solutions. If you lived in Europe the proma 150 THC with LinuxCNC might be an option but you don't. Personally, if you are making money in a production setting, you are probably off buying a real system but they are not cheap. There is a reason to this and Tom alluded to it. Plasma is a lot more than a THC. Thats just a small part of the package. The high end systems have full integration with the trajectory planner and nesting and lots more.
Of the options mentioned, I would put my money on Tom's system. He is the only one offering a complete system and he uses LinuxCNC for the motion controller which has far more power (almost infinitely more) rather than a separate motion controller board running an embedded system. Its not perfect but neither is the Hypertherm software offering according to my neighbour who just put $100k down on one
I've got no vested interest in any of these systems and use the power of LinuxCNC itself to do the THC and all of the anti dive features, kerf crossing, auto torch sampling. But there isn't a mature system available and if you can't program in C and Python, my path would be a long one for you. The time may come when you don't need any of these systems but its not now.
In the meantime, CandCNC is the best solution out there as its a blended approach that uses a combination of external hardware and LinuxCNC's architecture that has allowed to to do in software tightly bound to the trajectory planner what he can't achieve in hardware. Plus he offers a post processor for sheetcam to do your nesting and post processing. I don't think the other systems have that level of integration available and if they do, they don't have anywhere near the processing power of a real time operating system running on a powerful 64 bit mainstream CPU that CommandCNC running LinuxCNC offers.
Rod Webster
www.vehiclemods.net.au