On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 08:17:07PM +0000, Chris Morley wrote:
> Point aNd Click (just a working name)
>
> The first goal is to be able to configure a servo controlled mill/lathe using
> a parport and/or mesa 5i20 with hostmot4.
>
> I meant to develop it more in a branch before offering it to Trunk.
I think it's a happy accident - since it doesn't break anything else
even though it is incomplete, I think trunk is the right place.
When I recently configured my lathe with a mesa 5i20, I ran into some
limitations with the hal_m5i20/hostmot4 driver/firmware. These were:
The watchdog disables the DACs, but not the digital outputs, so it
wouldn't cause an estop, it just caused the axes to stop (drift,
actually!)
Index mask pins are incorrectly hooked up in the firmware - they
are on outputs, not inputs, if I remember right. So they are not
usable.
There are no encoder velocity pins so I was not able to read the
spindle speed in a way that's safe across indexes (see recent
thread about the ppmc driver, which also has this problem).
The first two were show-stoppers for me. I know requiring index
mask is rare and peculiar to my machine, but the watchdog defect is
nasty and surely affects everyone.
I like the simple names of the pins in the hal_m5i20 driver and I
assume that's why you have chosen to use it -- but it sure has some
problems that are fixed in hostmot2.
What help could I or others offer to convince you to change to using
hostmot2? I think it would be fine to target the same card set that
hal_5i20 requires. It is a good mix for a lot of machines. You would
not have to support all the configurability possible with hostmot2.
That would balloon the project a lot.
Alternatively maybe there is a way to make it more hardware-agnostic.
It would be nice if it was usable for ppmc cards too - but I don't
know how much more crazy a task that would make it.
Chris
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