I have been hunting for a very rigid but small machine for the last year or so.

And when I finally found one for sale on an auction in Minnesota, I could not pass.

Now the machine is in my garage.

It is a surprisingly heavy machine with a solid epoxy granite frame.

The features are as follows:

• 1.5HP 5000 RPM spindle
• Closed loop servos on all axes
• Power draw bar and a rack tool changer assembly

I built a table with casters for it and upon plugging it to a computer it turned out that.... It's dead!

The proprietary Animatics control in the back is not working, which means 95% of all electronics in the back must be replaced.

I was actually almost hoping for that because the original software is DOS-only. It is hardly convenient to work with it.

I want it to work under mach or LinuxCNC

So I ordered the required parts online and when all of them are here, I will start the retrofit process.

I will be documenting my process in comments.

Wish me luck!

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Previously when someone asked me whether HSMAdvisor works on linux or Mac I would steer them towards using VirtualBox or Parallels or some other virtual machine to run HSMAdvisor in the virtual Windows box.

As it turns out it is not always necessary.

Our customer has just managed to successfully run HSMA on Linux using package called Wine.

All he had to do was to use wine in 32 bit mode.

I, personally, did not think it was possible to run an app as complex as HSMAdvisor on linux without any modifications on my side. But i was wrong!

Here is a helpful link if you are running 64 bit version of linux and your Wine refuses to launch HSMAdvisor in 32 bit mode:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/136714/how-to-force-wine-into-acting-like-32-bit-windows-on-64-bit-ubuntu

Reportedly Reference and Geometry tabs do not work. But this is not surprising, since they use Internet Explorer to show the information.

Also pressing ENTER key causes the app to crash.

I am going to install a test Linux system on my workstation in the near future and figure out how to fix those issues and make Non-Windows support more readily available.

On another news.

Having made a new FSWizard App design and right before publishing. I decided to rewrite the whole core almost from scratch.

This was needed to make room for new modules like User Tool Libraries and Machine Profiles.

The work is going ahead at full speed and in due time i will roll our the brand new spanking FSWizard!