While I don't have a problem with separating the motion control and the HMI hardware. (it is how most commercial CNCs have done it for the past 30 years or more.) But being more like a printer isn't a good thing. I've used CNCs whose controls are set up very similar to how a printer works, and frankly they are a giant pain in the ass to use compared with a conventional CNC. (The manufacturer of those routers mostly makes large format printers and stuff for the sign industry.) While it kind of sucks on a sign router, I think that system would be almost totally unworkable on a cnc mill. Just about the only reason those 3 routers haven’t had a brain transplant to convert them to Linuxcnc, is the half a terabyte of existing code already set up for the old proprietary system, and doesn't use g-code and can't be easily ported to a different system. (Well, I've actually converted one of them but It's old control can still be plugged back in and used, but that wouldn't be possible with the other 2.) It is hard to ash can that many man hours of setting up machine files (nearly 20yrs of accumulation.)
Todd Zuercher P. Graham Dunn Inc. 630 Henry Street Dalton, Ohio 44618 Phone: (330)828-2105ext. 2031 -----Original Message----- From: Les Newell <les.new...@fastmail.co.uk> Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2020 8:15 AM To: emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Emc-users] Open source CNC architecture [EXTERNAL EMAIL] Be sure links are safe. > What I really > meant was that with a printer, all the critical timing happens in the > printer. There are no servo-loops on the PC and you don't need a > real-time OS to print to paper. Who cares where the servo loops or trajectory planning are? When the end user presses a button to move the machine they don't care how it is implemented. They only care that it works. Running a machine takes CPU cycles. You can either use the CPU in your PC or an external one. What difference does it make? Think of your printer example. Do you know or care how much processing is done in the PC? For example the driver may convert your print page to PostScript and send that to the printer. The printer then renders that PostScript to an image of the page. Alternatively the driver may render the print to a bitmap image of the page and send that to the printer. The only real difference is in where the processing is done. To the end user the experience is exactly the same. Les _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
