Hi Will, Thanks for the info on Arduino - looks like some interesting possibilities there. I didn't realize that Arduino had several different boards available. I may be able to connect one or more boards to a DB25 parallel connector to control my HobbyCNC micro-stepping driver board.
Thanks, Bob Rice On Jan 18, 2012, at 10:33 AM, Will Thorne wrote: > Hello, > > Long time lurker making first post here. You could use an Arduino and do the > real time pulse generation stuff on that. Then just write a macruby app that > serialises the commands and feeds them to the Arduino which interprets them > and flips the necessary IO pins on and off. It's years since I looked at this > stuff but I seem to remember that CNC commands work such that they could be > grouped into a single machining operation. Hypothetical example to cut a slot > on a horizontal miller: Start milling cutter, start carriage +z, stop > carriage, start carriage +x, stop carriage, start carriage -z, stop carriage, > stop cutter. You could load that whole sequence into the Arduino if you break > it down into groups like this. Put the arduino in a plastic box with a > parallel port on one end and usb cable coming out the other? I don't know for > sure that this would work, but in my experience microcontrollers are much > simpler to do real time stuff on because they have pretty much no software > stack compared to a desktop PC. > > Will > > On 18 Jan 2012, at 09:10, macruby-devel-requ...@lists.macosforge.org wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> I've become interested in Computer Numeric Control (CNC) machine control. I >> find there is very little support for the Macintosh platform and many PC >> programs for the task have a crude user interface so I would like to create >> a Macintosh CNC application using MacRuby. >> >> CNC programs and motor drivers generally use the LPT parallel port output >> from a PC in the basic unidirectional mode. Most PC CNC apps do not support >> PC laptops due to processor sleep logic interfering with stepper motor >> timing. I would need a similar fast interface on the Mac. >> >> I have a Prolific 2305 based USB to IEEE 1284 adapter cable that I would >> like to use. Mac OS recognizes the device as an "IEEE-1284 Controller" in >> the USB device tree and I can add a generic print queue for the device, but >> I don't know how to connect to the device at high speed as the printer >> controller does. >> >> Prolific provides documentation for the simple report protocol for the >> device. I suspect that an appropriate driver already exists for this device >> but how would I find it? >> >> Thanks, >> Bob Rice > > > _______________________________________________ > MacRuby-devel mailing list > MacRuby-devel@lists.macosforge.org > http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
_______________________________________________ MacRuby-devel mailing list MacRuby-devel@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
