A little OT, but it seems like there is healthy interest for doing CNC
machining from OS X, with or without MacRuby, I am currently working
on an AVR/Arduino based solution myself, so anybody know of a topical
ML and/or Wiki, or is there interest in setting up a site, or project
on github/launchpad to gather code, docs, war stories?

On 19 January 2012 22:21, Bill Hill <m...@wbh.org> wrote:
>
> On 18 Jan 2012, at 15:33, 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 st
>  ack compared to a desktop PC.
>
> Hi,
> Another lurker making a first post here! I'm getting into CNC Arduino and 
> I've been doing very much what you describe. I've currently got a lathe/mill 
> (Sieg C1 lathe + X1 head) that I've got driven by three steppers (Vexta 
> PK545) with their driver modules directly hooked to an Arduino. I initially 
> custom programmed the Arduino for each job, but now I'm sending simple 
> commands from OSX and the Arduino parses the commands and bit bashes to step 
> the motors. There's one step connection and one direction connection per 
> motor, and one common "engage" connection to let me manually position; 7 
> outputs total. At the moment I'm manually sending CNC commands using screen, 
> plus I've got a few custom routines as command line C binaries (drill a big 
> hole with a small end mill and do a crib board ;-) I hadn't thought of using 
> MacRuby for this...
> Bill
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