PCs are cheap, easily available and easy to code on. They provide huge
amounts of processing power for little money and are very well suited to
GUI applications. However they are not designed for hard real time work.
LinuxCNC does a good job but even then it tends to be a bit touchy if
not paired with some form of control hardware to take over the really
tight timing. Mesa's FPGA cards are a good example. I do a fair amount
of repair an maintenance on a variety of CNC machines. The majority of
them go the same route and use a PC for the front end and some sort of
custom hardware or PLC for motion control.
How complicated does your controller have to be? Mesa's FPGA boards for
example are pretty dumb and need feeding every 1ms, which LinuxCNC
handles quite easily on most PC hardware. How much do you gain by moving
more of the motion control to external hardware?
Les
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