Open Builds Control Capability with Very Large 3D Finishing Files

Hi Everyone -

I was hoping I could ask you a question about OB Control. I run a ShopBot PRS Alpha at our local makerspace, and I sometimes do 13-24+ hour 3D finish carve toolpaths that are 20-100MB. I make 3D topographic maps (TERRA LIGNA), in VCarve Pro with 10-20GB STL files that I create in GIS software.

I'm planning to retrofit a 1000m Chinese Ebay CNC machine in my home shop where I can run the finish carves for these long periods of time after doing the roughing with a larger bit on the ShopBot. The machine is basically going to be equivalent of the Open Builds High Z kit machine.

I'm wondering if you could speak to the technical capabilities of the OB Control software as compared to Mach 3 in terms of how it's pipeline handles these large, lengthy carves. I'm trying to decide if it would be worthy to totally re-build the machine with the Open Builds Control software and Open Builds USB box.

For a control PC I currently have a very old offline Windows 7 Dell Precision 390 PC with 4Gb of RAM running mach 3 with a TB6600 cheap USB breakout board, and it handles 11 hour finish carves. I purposely use this old offline box. When I run the carves, there is typically about 1Gb of RAM free and the CPU is at 8-10%. I also have a Windows 10 Pro PC with dual 3.6 GHZ Xeon, 64 GB of RAM, and an NVidia Titan X card which I could use instead.

Thanks for your time and expertise.

 

Thank you for the reply Peter. If I was going to move to OBC software I would probably use my newer PC.

So you’re saying I can load a very large path and run it overnight as if it was controlling the Open Builds USB box and see if it crashes? Or would it be worth purchasing the USB box and actually connecting it, even though I wouldn’t have anything else wire to it yet? OBPS has been excellent with returns durning my build thus far.