On Fri, 2012-03-30 at 10:01 +0200, Jan de Kruyf wrote: > Kirk, > what you see on Ebay is last years technology. Personally I would see > if the SERCOSII interface cannot be > stripped out of the drives and wether they can be used with a 0-10V > interface. > Kollmorgen drives for instance have that possibility. > > I know it sound strange after my comment earlier, but SERCOSII is an > old beast that works, but only just. > once it gets sick it takes a lot of doctors to get it right. I believe > it has to do with wether you wear your rabbit's foot > in your left pocket or your right pocket, but I never found out which. > > Further The drive software will have to be either reverse engineered > or we have to buy the spec from the sercos organisation. > Even the interface chip to the serial link has only partially > published specs. The rest is to be bought. > > SERCOSIII on the other hand has GPLed software on sourceforge, and it > used ethernet, probably > because of market pressure from Beckhof. > > j.
I mentioned the older SERCOS because, so far LinuxCNC features have followed need. For instance resolvers were not supported until some of the developers got machines that had resolvers. The same goes for tool changers. Someone gets a machine, finds a feature that needs support, creates it, then publishes the result. I figured the way SERCOS would get support is if enough user/developers started getting machines with SERCOS. My guess is that eBay would indicate what hardware might become popular. SERCOS III certainly seems attractive but I don't think anyone on this list will be getting machine conversions with this kind of hardware. I haven't studied Smart Serial yet, but I'm wondering if Peter plans to use it for real-time remote control? Another angle on this is have a hobby version of SERCOS, but it would have to be so cheap that it would not matter if it really worked or not. Another idea that popped up was to massage ModbusRTU for real-time. Each slave would be on its own master port and use full duplex. The master hardware would be an FPGA or AVR on PCI or parallel port and would send commands out all ports at (or nearly) the same time. But for the hobby arena and somewhat beyond what we have now works pretty well. The user interface and documentation is what needs attention more than anything else. -- Kirk Wallace http://www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/ http://www.wallacecompany.com/E45/index.html California, USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF email is sponsosred by: Try Windows Azure free for 90 days Click Here http://p.sf.net/sfu/sfd2d-msazure _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
