Ok folks.. Here is where I am at.. If you want to read the entire thing great, but the bottom line, I need SPEED.. What I have tried so far has failed..
I am sure there is a easy solution, or at least a doable solution for what I am trying to do. This maybe a bit long winded but here goes. Many, many moons ago.. I used to do some consulting work with Shopbot tools. Since then I have been consulting/working in around CNC machines. I have worked with/played with many CNC apps.. EMC2, TurboCNC, Shopbot DOS and Windows versions, MACH 2, MACH 3 etc.. even played with creating my own stepgen apps/code snippets etc via several different languages using the LPT port on a regular PC.. so forth and so on, all with great success.. So I have experience with many different stepgen applications. All of the above is great experiences.. Now for the rest of the story.. My brother owns a small haunted house and it is currently growing.. For the last few years he has been using the small micro controllers such as PICAXE, Arduino for automation etc... Nice for what he is doing when it comes to small props like break beams, switched inputs, floor mat switches, turning on fog machine or light etc etc etc.. yadda yadda.. This year he comes to me with a project that requires a bit more muscle... Of course, I said YES.. I will do it.. This project is basically a small, crude 2 axis CNC machine... Easy enough, right? Sure... So I pulled out a pic 18m2 off of the shelf, a stepper motor, stepper motor driver, wired it all up.. and we were off to the races.. motor spun to the right, to the left as expected... I figured at this point, a few trips to the hardware store to pick up some goodies to build the x rails and the y gantry and we would be in business... Then there comes the issues.. Using a 1.8 degree stepper motor, 18 M2 chip , the fasted I could turn ONE motor was around 20 to 30 times a minute let alone try to enter in a second motor in the equation. .. ugh.. the math works out to be 90 to 100hz... So.. Along comes along the Raspberry Pi.. I said, oh yeah.. this will work.. Well.. needless to say but.. after many hours of playing around to get the GPIO's to produce faster results was NIL.... Need a Solution.. I am guessing at this part.. I need to use some additional processing power.. Using SPI I guess to off load the signal generation and counting off to another process looks like my best bet??? I mean.. I can get many, many gadgets or chips or what ever to generate the pulses for me but.. I need to keep track of where in the heck the machine is.. I thought of having something generate the steps and I add encoders to the machine but.. Heck if I can not generate the steps.. I am not even sure I can read the pulses from the encoder fast enough... Some additional information.. the machine does not have to be very accurate.. even if I am with in 1/50th of an Inch or so.. I am golden. I hope there is a "fairly" cheap solution out there.. Thanks Robert I. ShellLead Technical Specialist / Senior Software EngineerGlobal Transaction Services / Fund ServicesCiti Group - Columbus OhioCell: (740) 972-1085 > From: [email protected] > Date: Thu, 30 May 2013 20:05:05 +0100 > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [Emc-users] Olinuxino/Beagleboard/bone, Xenomai, SPI? > > On 30 May 2013 19:19, Andrew <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> No reason it wouldn't work just as well on the 7i43 as on any other Mesa > >> card. > > > OK, then I guess I should start from compiling MESA firmware. > > That's probably quite a hard place to start, and I guess that Pete > might already have a suitable firmware. > > About 3 years ago I decided to learn C to work on the 3-phase PWM > component of Hostmot2. > > -- > atp > If you can't fix it, you don't own it. > http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Introducing AppDynamics Lite, a free troubleshooting tool for Java/.NET > Get 100% visibility into your production application - at no cost. > Code-level diagnostics for performance bottlenecks with <2% overhead > Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_ap1 > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Introducing AppDynamics Lite, a free troubleshooting tool for Java/.NET Get 100% visibility into your production application - at no cost. Code-level diagnostics for performance bottlenecks with <2% overhead Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_ap1 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
