I am starting work on my mill setup, which uses Sanyo BLDC motors and Rutex drives. The Rutex drives have SPI and step/direction inputs. Without thinking too much about it, I brought up the standard stepper configuration in Axis and before I tried to command a move, I grabbed the motor shaft and turned it to check the encoder polarity. Dooh, of course nothing happened, and I was reminded that the encoder feedback stops at the drive. So I studied the Stepgen diagram in the Integrator's Manual to see how to route the encoder back to EMC and began to realize that most of Stepgen is already in the drive. Why would I want to use Stepgen when all I need is a way to get position commands into the drive? Unless someone can provide valid arguments to the contrary, step/direction inputs on drives seem to just be a hack to make it convenient to interface to legacy systems. What would be the cleanest way to use the step/direction as a communications path (albeit, output only)?
Has there been any movement on adding SPI to EMC? Paul_C updated a parallel port SPI driver for me to work with 2.6 kernels, so I can communicate with SPI devices, but my guess is, this is just a small part of getting EMC to talk to SPI drives. Would it be more accurate to to say, what I need is a Rutex driver that happens to use SPI? If getting SPI working would be similar to Ethernet I/O, has there been any documentation created from the recent thread on Ethernet I/O that I could study? -- Kirk Wallace (California, USA http://www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/ Hardinge HNC lathe Bridgeport mill conversion pending Zubal lathe conversion pending) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
