Like someone said here before, the bandwidth of USB is certainly enough for (open loop) motor control of as many axes as one can imagine, but the latency might not be good enough for real time feedback loops (1kHz loop rate is what most people use I think).
One 'device-on-a-rope' at least I would find interesting would be an FPGA, similar to the m5i20 (pci-bus) or the pluto (parallel port) we have now. Whether the 'rope' is USB, FireWire, or Ethernet would not be that important for me since all of those are available on a modern laptop. From previous discussion it seems that at least the Ethernet solution is doable. (100Mbit or 1Gbit dedicated network card) I'm now building a servo system around the m5i20 but I'm having to use some amount of discrete logic etc. to accommodate the encoders, servo drives, etc. If I would do it all again I would put more things in software(FPGA blocks) and less in hardware. Inexpensive customizable FPGA's with open source vhdl would be ideal. AW ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
