Hi everyone, I have built a simple ornamental turning (OT) lathe which I control with EMC. I generate the gcode to rotate and move the lathe head from side to side and in and out using gcode generated by some software I have written. However I want to investigate the possibility of controlling the lathes movements using a separate micro-controller board rather than the PC. I have used an Arduino to generate pulse trains to control the rotational stepper separately, but am not sure it is up to the job of controlling everything simultaneously although in ornamental turning everything happens very slowly compared to standard cnc machining (say rotations of head axis of up to 10 revs per minute at up to 0.1 degree resolution with correspondingly slow movements along the other two axes).
I can write the code which I envisage will rotate the headstock and also move it traversely and horizontally synchronized to the headstock rotation). I was thinking of using the EMC core code functionality as a guide, so this is committing EMC without the UI onto separate hardware. I thought that perhaps I could generate and download tables of movements on the PC, download them onto the controller and run from there. So I think I need a controller plus simple keypad and small text display as one unit with ability to communicate with PC. I know that I could build a very small PC104 system that would run EMC directly but thought that would be a bit costly for what is a hobby project. So I am looking for suggestions for a suitable controller or development kit or alternative method. Thanks Alan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
