Hi, Thanks for all of the replies. I was looking for a Mac based CNC program long ago and was amazed that there still is little or none. I don't have a lot of time in this yet, but I was able to design a nice CNC UI and basic motion engine easily using MacRuby. There is certainly enough interest for me to continue on this project.
I like the Arduino solution and ordered a nano board. The Atmel 328P should be able to generate the fast pulse train required for the highest micro-stepping resolution. Bob Rice On Jan 19, 2012, at 4:21 PM, Bill Hill 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 s t > 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 > _______________________________________________ > 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
