Marcin Jakubowski wrote: > Thanks for the responses on EMC laptops. But surely there must be at > least one specific laptop that does work? Is there any success story > out there at ALL for a working laptop?
I don't recall hearing about any that work well. You may be able to tweak the BIOS a lot and end up with something that could work. The problem isn't so much the parallel ports and pcmcia cards, it's interrupt latency. Laptop computers usually have lots of power-saving features, and many of them can't be disabled in the BIOS (why would you want to, normally?). The power management systems uses SMI (System Management Interrupt or Interface) to enter SMM - System Management Mode, and that interrupt must not be disabled (it's what alerts the system when the CPU is overheating, for example). So when you close the lid, or some timer expires (usually every 64 seconds or so), an SMI interrupt occurs, which can cause latencies in the hundreds of milliseconds. If that happened while you were generating a step pulse stream on the parallel port, your steppers would stall. That's the real problem with laptops and realtime programs such as EMC2. - Steve ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
