On Thursday 17 September 2009, David Braley wrote: >Hello all, > >I wanted to say thanks again for all your input and help bringing me up >to speed! > >I'm cranking away researching my Anilam 1100 retrofit, and I'm having >troubles feeling secure about the parallel port as a robust enough >device to control three or four axis of motion at modest 100ipm table >speeds. I can see a PCI based I/O card doing it, but I'm feeling iffy >about the parallel port. I know that EMC is super competent using either >style device for it's main motion control I/O.
I am personally doing 4 axis's, spindle speed and direction, and a contact probe, through the parport of a Mach Speed mobo, with a amd XP-1400 athlon actually running at 1600mhz on it, using an 8 microstepping xylotex motor driver, at speeds up to about 40ipm for the z, and the low 30's for x/y. That is all my motors can do w/o stalling at the voltages available (28.5 volts) with xylotex drivers. With something like or better than the 80 volt Gecko drivers, I may be able to hit 60 ipm, but more would require the 20 tpi screws in my xy table to be replaced with something more realistic, which would require a whole new spindle in order to have power enough to cut at those speeds. The micromills spindle setup is at best, rather puny. FWIW, I do have a 2nd, 2 port parport card in the machine, intending to convert a lathe at some point, if and when I get one big enough to convert, the 7x12 is too close to a toy. >The two axis Anilam 1100 machine I have now has a program/DRO resolution >of 0.0001", and can machine up to 100ipm. I would like to retain these >performance parameters after the retrofit at a minimum if possible. > >I think I read somewhere that EMC can control up to 8 axis (or more) of >motion through the parallel port. What I'm concerned with is, how fast >can it control motion compared to a PCI based I/O device. I read (I >tried to anyway) a white paper on the specifications of the ISA parallel >port standard. It really is not that fast of a device compared to the >PCI bus standard. Well, it seemed that way to me. I'm looking to make >this retrofit as reliable as possible, and get some decent performance >out of it to. > >Is there a point in which the parallel port is not fast enough, or not a >wide enough data pipe to do the job? Or is it fast enough for anything >an automated machine tool would ever need? > >Parallel port? PCI I/O card as a port? Red pill? Blue pill? ;-) > >Sorry if this has been asked before: Generally, it has been noted here on this list that the ISA ports are slow, but it seems the superio based ports such as are on the newer motherboards could be faster. But even with steppers like I'm using, the speed limit would appear to be much more a function of the voltage available to drive the motors long before the port speed would seem to be a problem. In any event, a cheap 2 port pci card can be installed if one would like to test the theory. I believe I have 20 USD in mine. >Are there any main stream commercial machine tool companies out there >that use the PC's parallel port device for motion control? Companies >like Haas, Mazak, Harding, Bridgeport, Hurco, Monarc, etc? > >Take care, > >David -- Cheers David, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. <https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp> Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Come build with us! The BlackBerry® Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9-12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconf _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
