The whole _point_ of EMC was to do the realtime on off-the shelf > general purpose computers rather than on specialised hardware. >
Yes, that was the point. But look today people are building systems using a $35 ARM based "PC connected to a $100 FPGA board and then to a couple hundred dollars worth of servo drivers. The cost has flipped. The external specialized hardware (Mesa card) costs 3X more then the PC. And the gecko-style drivers even more. Actually if yu loud to single digits al that i left is the specialized external hardware. Nothing wrong with this just commenting one how far current usage is from the initial design goal. > > LinuxCNC is a machine controller that runs everything on one general > purpose PC. That might not be the optimal way to do it, but if you > want to do it a different way then I don't think that LinuxCNC is a > good place to start. > LinuxCNC has excellent parts A g-code interpreter and a motion planner and a flexible way to tie it all together. I think the current trend in the industry is to move the control loops closer to the motors. There is good reason today to do this. In the old days computers were expensive so you wanted to use just one of them. Today they are nearly free. In fact I can by a STM32F on a PCB for less than the price of a good power cable. Today the cost of "specialized external hardware is near zero because it can be created simply by programming a general purpose board like an Arduino or its more modern equivalent. What I'm looking into is a distributed system with computing pushed closer to where it is used. Grapical stuff should happen on a GPU connected to the monitor. Servo lop can be close on the motor > GRBL might be a good place to start, or some other uP-based controller. > GRBL is not a distributed system. It really is the old EMC design where everyone runs on one computer. Its problem is that it sacrifices generality so it can run on the very low end computer. I don'tsee a reason to use a micro controller except for battery powered devices or if you need to talk to hardware pins. A laptop PC would be ideal -- Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
