Rainer, There are plenty of options under EMC for directly interfacing with servos. Do I read you correctly that you are generating step signals through Mach and then use hardware to covert steps to either a pwm or analog signal?
You can bypass generating step signals in EMC by using any of a number of inexpensive motion modules, such as Mesa's 5i20 or 7i43 controllers (http://www.mesanet.com/). These are FPGA controllers configurable to generate signals such as step and pwm. With the 7i33 module, which can be connected to either controller, you can convert the pwm signal to analog if that is the interface to your servo amplifiers. Or just keep what you have and configure step and direction signals from the FPGA configuration. Unlike when generating stepper signals directly, the FPGA does all the heavy lifting, so you can back off significantly on the base and servo periods. Thus the speed of your computer should not be nearly as critical. BTW, I have no association with Mesa other than having successfully implement a number of machines with their products. How are you generating your circles, using G2/G3 commands, or as a series of lines (G1) as can happen when importing from formats such as HPGL? Regards, Eric Hi there This is my first post. My name is Rainer Schmidt and I'm from Bloomfield, NJ. I build a 4x8 servo drivven gantry router and am currently using Mach3 as planer and to drive my servo drives. While having some mysterious problems I decided to give EMC a try. One cannot have enough alternatives. In Mach3 I am using a hardware to generate steps and direction signals to the servo drives. I read that there is a piece of Hardware doing the same thing for EMC. If someone could give me a shopping list, that would be fantastic. I have a rather high resolution on the axis and thus need higher pulse rates. it owuld make me feel better if I have a reliable source for those pulses than my PC... I ran the latency test and my Dell Optiplex GX280 is having a feisty processor but 27-30 is to slow.... The problem I am having with Mach3 is that I have flat's on my circles. And no clue where they can come from. I have no measurable backlash and different toolpath shows no change either. So I suspect Mach3 doing some strange stuff with the settings I applied. EMC to the rescue haha ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
