> From: Bari [mailto:[email protected]] > I was not arguing just for the sake of arguing. I'm trying to nail down > what exactly the other idea is with LinuxCNC and microcontroller and who > will work on it. > Dave Matthews posted about the USB to Parallel dongle. That's the start of this thread. Along the way it kind of went here and there.
I can tell you that as I used my South Bend Heavy 10L with taper attachment to cut both a tapered mandrel and the new pulleys for my mill I really appreciate my ELS. And I don't even have the cross slide powered. There were some tedious points where I would have liked automatic X motion. But overall it was in essence a manual operation. As I use the CNC part of my mill conversion and the Pendant with MPG I notice how much clumsier it is compared to power feed and using the DROs. Although once a pattern was established either creating a quick g-code file or reusing previous single lines in the right order it started to be nicer than the monotony of a manual mill. The pendant I have doesn't do enough although it's handy for sneaking up to an edge until edge finder LED comes on. I'm sure there's some way to use the edge finder with LinuxCNC once I bring a wire out and replace the battery with a power regulator. The conversion of my ELS PIC18F code to PIC32 was trivial with only the processor specific stuff taking any major effort. Interrupt service time went from 35uS to under 3.2uS. And that's with the free non-optimizing Microchip X32 compiler. But Microchip has decided to create ransomware now with the X32 compiler. Buy it for $1K US and you can optimize for speed or size. A year later, unless you pay, it reverts back to the free version. True, the ransom is only about $400 but it's still a ransom to get the optimizing back. So different from a company that desperately wanted to sell processors a few decades ago. So now I'm taking a look at the TI 320F2837xD with dual processors and quadrature support etc. https://www.ti.com/tool/LAUNCHXL-F28379D The PIC32 interface was just to replace the PIC18F processor along with 3.3V to 5V translation. http://www.autoartisans.com/ELS/photos/AdaptorBoard-7.jpg So once a few other projects have been completed I'm thinking I'll create an interface cable from this board to the intermediate board above. And port the ELS code to one of the two processor on it. I could also interface to this LCD board for example: http://www.autoartisans.com/ELS/photos/4DCAPE-43T-1.jpg or a number of other LCD touch screens I have in my bin. Instead of the 2x20 LCD display. But in the long run my plan is to create the equivalent of my Lathe ELS for the mill. Effectively giving it a DRO and 5 axis power feed in a small module. Similar to the ones you can buy from China for $200 to $400 running an ARM and some sort of MACH3 look alike software but not CNC. And if it has an Ethernet port then a connection to a real CNC system is possible. Or maybe I'll grow to really like pure CNC on my system and the project will die a slow death. John Dammeyer _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
