That's why back in the 80's when Light Machines designed the ProLight 2000 they
used an Animatics servo control box equipped to run 3 or four axes. All the
smarts are in the mill. All that's needed to just mill stuff is a steady stream
of incoming G-Code and ACK back and forth so the thing will stop should
whatever is streaming G-Code to it fail. I'm pretty certain the mill controller
can handle stopping itself when endstop switches are hit. Those signals are
sent to the computer so the software will stop.
With that setup anything that can run a DOS program and have an absolute total
lock on an RS232 port can operate a PLM2000. It also means nobody has bothered
to produce any alternative software for the machines in ~30 years. Know how
much of a PITA it is to find a working PC type computer capable of having EMS
memory setup on it? Yup. The ProLight DOS software is so old it predates XMS
memory.
I do have a ton of technical info, software etc for the Animatics controller.
Got it from a guy at Moog-Animatics who stayed after their merger and still had
an old backup drive. With that I'd think it should be fairly simple to add
support to LCNC to at least have the same functionality as the DOS software.
Just monitor the feedback from switches, estop, over-torque etrc, and push the
G-code at it, while having a nicer UI and no problems with running out of
conventional DOS memory or having to find an old box capable of EMS in order to
handle large G-code files.
I've run mine off an old laptop booted off a USB floppy drive. It works but the
memory space is so chopped up on laptops (and desktops with all the motherboard
integrated peripherals) that there's no contiguous 64 kilobyte region of the
Upper Memory Area (above 640K to 1024K) free for the page frame. There are some
EMS implementations that can dynamically remap several sub-64K UMA into one
virtual window, but there's still a minimum chunk size and it sure seems that
PC manufacturers of the late 90's and up have gone to great effort to ensure
the UMA of their products is so chunked up and fragmented there's just no way
to do EMS.
An LCNC for motion controllers and drip-feed, stripped down of fancy internal
functions (for example, the old controller can't do thread milling so there's
no need for the control software to be able to do the math for that), would be
a very welcome thing with vintage CNC. My big knee mill from 1990 (that I still
haven't been able to get around to finishing the refit) originally had Anilam
Crusader 2. The setup had a serial port, which I assume with a rudimentary DOS
program a PC could have fed it a large stream of commands the Anilam system
understood, of far greater length than could be stored on its little tape drive.
What would be more complex is doing thread milling on a mill that has no built
in code to do such a thing. The control software would need to have a total
list of all the mill's capabilities then would have to be able to translate
from the interpolations for thread milling to a series of commands the mill
does know in order to emulate the function, or it would have to spew forth a
massive list of step by step XYZ moves, if the old machine can be commanded
that way.
On Wednesday, February 12, 2020, 4:47:52 AM MST, Les Newell
<les.new...@fastmail.co.uk> wrote: <clip>
If you just want to run a basic desktop router on the cheap get an
Arduino and chuck GRBL on it. You now have an external board running a
motion controller with the PC just feeding it g-code. It's as close to
your 'printer' concept as you're going to get. You can even run it
completely standalone off a SD card. Of course there is no way GRBL can
handle a bigger more complex machine.
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