On Jan 18, 2012, at 1:10 AM, Dave Baldwin wrote: > PC based CNC controllers are suck in the dark ages - not only for the GUI > they present but in how they control the steppers via the printer port. They > rely on low level Window's drivers to generate accurate timing pulses (on the > parallel port pins) and this process is easily disrupted by other system > activity. On a dedicated controller you can disable many of the system > activities (network wifi, virus scanning, etc.) that will loose you accuracy, > but even so the number of steps per second you can reliably generate is > limited.
That's an excellent point, of course. I might also offer, depending on how real-time the requirements of your CNC equipment is, an alternative solution which would be to pick up a programmable microcontroller (many fine ones exist these days, with both USB and parallel interfaces to boot) and off-load the responsibility for servicing the equipment to it, then talking high-level to the microcontroller over USB from your MacRuby app. There are quite a few folks doing smaller-scale Arduino CNC jobs (just google for "arduino CNC" for a random sampling) and, depending on how industrial your needs are, the Arduinos are a dream to program for. - Jordan
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