Re: [Emc-users] Hardware suggestions for EMC
Marcin, I found your Factor E project very interesting and hope to contribute. For the control, you might wish to investigate the use of a thin client which is a diskless, lightweight computer intended mainly for web surfing. I've been playing around with the Netier XL1000; see: http://fennetic.net/machines/netier which sells on ebay for $30 shipped. (sometimes for much less.) It's an AMD K2 processor clocked at 200-400MHz depending on whether the heatsink has a fan or not. Also the RAM is limited at 32MB stock but it's expandable (2 slots) with low-profile DIMM's. These have a 44-pin 2mm spacing IDE connector (read: weird) which I've used to successfully boot from a compact flash drive. A better solution is to PXE boot over the network and run the whole thing via a laptop connected to the ethernet port with a crossover cable or hub. Then you can run AXIS remotely on whatever laptop you have. Think of it more like a printer than a game console. The advantages: it's small, has a parallel port, has no moving parts, has a PCI/ISA riser slot (i think that's what the brown connector is for) The Netier achieved 50,000ns max latency over the course of several days with X11 turned off; the latency goes up to ~1ms if you move a window around. So, 50,000ns = 10kHz max step rate -- 2kHz realistic step rate. Won't run a high-speed high-resolution stepper system, but since yours is low resolution it should be good enough anyway. Average latency is more like 15,000ns so you could bump it up a notch if you can tolerate the occasional glitch. Steppers are gross by the way, especially with inexpensive drive electronics. Have you investigated homebrew servo motors at all? Some other things to consider: * case should have filtered air and be well sealed to prevent metal dust and chips from entering * get a sealed keyboard such as the silicone roll-up variety * I have a pile of XL1000's, and I could send you a couple -fenn On Wed, 5 Mar 2008, Marcin Jakubowski wrote: Dear Group, It appears that it's best for me not to attempt EMC with a laptap. I'll dry a desktop. I would like to compose my own desktop EMC PC to run the acetylene torch that I am working on. Can someone suggest a set of proven components to make this work? I'm looking for a good price, and it does not necessarily have to be top performance. I need only as much computer power as will provide effective EMC operation of 3-4 stepper motors for my torch table. Please let me know recommendations: 0. Case 1. Motherboard 2. CPU 3. Memory 4. Hard drive 5. Disc drive 6. Flat panel screen other? Thanks, Marcin - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Hardware suggestions for EMC
Fenn, Thanks for these hints, looks like we have a solution! I'm definitely interested in working out the Netier XL1000. I have not investigated homebrew servos. I would like to talk about that in more detail. Perhaps we can talk more directly offline, or phone, or Skype. Please send me your contact information, I'd like to pursue this as soon as possible. I'd like to send you my mail location. Thanks, Marcin Skype: marcin_ose Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 816.645.5779 On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 8:52 AM, ben lipkowitz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Marcin, I found your Factor E project very interesting and hope to contribute. For the control, you might wish to investigate the use of a thin client which is a diskless, lightweight computer intended mainly for web surfing. I've been playing around with the Netier XL1000; see: http://fennetic.net/machines/netier which sells on ebay for $30 shipped. (sometimes for much less.) It's an AMD K2 processor clocked at 200-400MHz depending on whether the heatsink has a fan or not. Also the RAM is limited at 32MB stock but it's expandable (2 slots) with low-profile DIMM's. These have a 44-pin 2mm spacing IDE connector (read: weird) which I've used to successfully boot from a compact flash drive. A better solution is to PXE boot over the network and run the whole thing via a laptop connected to the ethernet port with a crossover cable or hub. Then you can run AXIS remotely on whatever laptop you have. Think of it more like a printer than a game console. The advantages: it's small, has a parallel port, has no moving parts, has a PCI/ISA riser slot (i think that's what the brown connector is for) The Netier achieved 50,000ns max latency over the course of several days with X11 turned off; the latency goes up to ~1ms if you move a window around. So, 50,000ns = 10kHz max step rate -- 2kHz realistic step rate. Won't run a high-speed high-resolution stepper system, but since yours is low resolution it should be good enough anyway. Average latency is more like 15,000ns so you could bump it up a notch if you can tolerate the occasional glitch. Steppers are gross by the way, especially with inexpensive drive electronics. Have you investigated homebrew servo motors at all? Some other things to consider: * case should have filtered air and be well sealed to prevent metal dust and chips from entering * get a sealed keyboard such as the silicone roll-up variety * I have a pile of XL1000's, and I could send you a couple -fenn On Wed, 5 Mar 2008, Marcin Jakubowski wrote: Dear Group, It appears that it's best for me not to attempt EMC with a laptap. I'll dry a desktop. I would like to compose my own desktop EMC PC to run the acetylene torch that I am working on. Can someone suggest a set of proven components to make this work? I'm looking for a good price, and it does not necessarily have to be top performance. I need only as much computer power as will provide effective EMC operation of 3-4 stepper motors for my torch table. Please let me know recommendations: 0. Case 1. Motherboard 2. CPU 3. Memory 4. Hard drive 5. Disc drive 6. Flat panel screen other? Thanks, Marcin - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
[Emc-users] Hardware suggestions for EMC
Dear Group, It appears that it's best for me not to attempt EMC with a laptap. I'll dry a desktop. I would like to compose my own desktop EMC PC to run the acetylene torch that I am working on. Can someone suggest a set of proven components to make this work? I'm looking for a good price, and it does not necessarily have to be top performance. I need only as much computer power as will provide effective EMC operation of 3-4 stepper motors for my torch table. Please let me know recommendations: 0. Case 1. Motherboard 2. CPU 3. Memory 4. Hard drive 5. Disc drive 6. Flat panel screen other? Thanks, Marcin - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Hardware suggestions for EMC
http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?Hardware_Requirements --- Marcin Jakubowski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear Group, It appears that it's best for me not to attempt EMC with a laptap. I'll dry a desktop. I would like to compose my own desktop EMC PC to run the acetylene torch that I am working on. Can someone suggest a set of proven components to make this work? I'm looking for a good price, and it does not necessarily have to be top performance. I need only as much computer power as will provide effective EMC operation of 3-4 stepper motors for my torch table. Please let me know recommendations: 0. Case 1. Motherboard 2. CPU 3. Memory 4. Hard drive 5. Disc drive 6. Flat panel screen other? Thanks, Marcin - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Hardware suggestions for EMC
On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 01:20:34PM +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi I have a milling machine here which i want to control with emc. Fo the first tests im using the normal parallel port adapter. I'm, however, afraid of loosing steps on my stepping motors so im planing to use some quadratur encoder to also measure the position of the axes. My questions now are: 1. Is it better to use a dedicated board which is able to control the stepper motor and readout the quadratur encoders. The board is connected via usb (usbserial modul) and the board can send a command for either speed or steps of the motor. No USB hardware is supported by emc at this time. 2. How would i readout quadratur encoder on the parallel port Use the 'encoder' module. After installing emc, man 9 encoder. 3. How many stepper motor can i control maximum with one parallelport and emc? Each stepper motor requires 2 hardware output pin. The parallel port has 13. So if no pins are required for other purposes, 6 stepper motors can be controlled, with one output pin left over. I know that question one implies writing a adaper for the hal. I have basic experience in xenomai programming. Would it be hard to implement the usb board into emc? You'd need a very thorough, low-level knowledge of USB in order to make a USB driver fit the HAL model (hardware read and write takes place according to function position in HAL threads, not based on interrupts or DMA). I don't even know whether this is possible. Jeff - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now http://get.splunk.com/ ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Hardware suggestions for EMC
Jeff Epler wrote: No USB hardware is supported by emc at this time. The card implements the USB CDC class (it lookes like a serial card to the operating system with the usbserial modul). So i thought since serial connection can be used it would also be possible to use the USB counterpart. I know that question one implies writing a adaper for the hal. I have basic experience in xenomai programming. Would it be hard to implement the usb board into emc? You'd need a very thorough, low-level knowledge of USB in order to make a USB driver fit the HAL model (hardware read and write takes place according to function position in HAL threads, not based on interrupts or DMA). I don't even know whether this is possible. I'm using the same setup (at least for the USB part) for controlling the speed of up to three dc motor on a mobile robot with xenomai. I wrote the USB firmware on the board by myself so USB knowledge shouldn't be problem. Writing the speed is just a matter of sending the correct codes via the USB CDC (dev/ttyUSB0) interface, also the position can be read in this way. So the setup will be like follows: xenomai + rtusb - /dev/ttyUSB0 - (internally converted to i2c) - 12 stepper motors with quadratur encoders. I already looked at the emc2/src/hal/drivers directory out i only found functions which write directly to a set of i/o pins. Isn't there any function/example to directly write a speed or number of step ticks with a frequency? jan - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now http://get.splunk.com/ ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Hardware suggestions for EMC
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I already looked at the emc2/src/hal/drivers directory out i only found functions which write directly to a set of i/o pins. Isn't there any function/example to directly write a speed or number of step ticks with a frequency? Well, you could look at the hal_ppmc.c driver. It uses the parallel port as a communication channel to control boards that do this. There are 3 different products. One is a traditional analog velocity servo interface, with a 16-bit DAC. One generates step/direction, and the last generates a PWM signal. All work like a servo, you read position from an encoder counter, compute a new velocity command in the PID routine (not in the driver but in another part of EMC2/HAL) and then send the new velocity to the controller. This sounds like what your board does using USB. One reason I have not gone with USB is that there is that 1 KHz frame clock. Maybe that is not a limitation with rtusb. I see that high speed usb has 8 micro-frames per ms. Jon - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now http://get.splunk.com/ ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
Re: [Emc-users] Hardware suggestions for EMC
Jon Elson wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I already looked at the emc2/src/hal/drivers directory out i only found functions which write directly to a set of i/o pins. Isn't there any function/example to directly write a speed or number of step ticks with a frequency? Well, you could look at the hal_ppmc.c driver. It uses the parallel port as a communication channel to control boards that do this. There are 3 different products. One is a traditional analog velocity servo interface, with a 16-bit DAC. One generates step/direction, and the last generates a PWM signal. All work like a servo, you read position from an encoder counter, compute a new velocity command in the PID routine (not in the driver but in another part of EMC2/HAL) and then send the new velocity to the controller. This sounds like what your board does using USB. One reason I have not gone with USB is that there is that 1 KHz frame clock. Maybe that is not a limitation with rtusb. I see that high speed usb has 8 micro-frames per ms. Thx allot for your answer Jon and Jeff. I will have a closer look at the drivers you mentioned adn try to get it running. jan - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now http://get.splunk.com/ ___ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
