"..." wrote:

Paul,
The parallel port drives the Geco controller which outputs the +/- 10 volts
analog control signal to the servo amp.
As Mark said there are a quite a few PC programs, a number of which have
demo's that you can download, I think there might be at least one public
domain besides EMC which runs on Linix.
I am converting one of my milling machines to cnc using stepper motors as
they are lower cost, but do not have feedback from encoders.
You have the servos,encoders and servo amps which are much better, so all
yon need are the controllers.
A number of cnc machines are using PC based systems in place of oem
controllers.
If you do a search for Indexer,Deskcnc you will also find the others.
I have an early dos version of Indexer which has now been improved and runs
in windows, they were one of the first to develop this type of software,
Arthur Volta is very helpful. Yes he is a distant relation to the man who
gave use Volts, what would we have done without him, nothing would work
without volts)
Geoff

Linux like Windows is preemptive. There is a real time version of Linux
developed at the University of New Mexico as I recall. Do you know
if anybody is using that?

Paul Lamar
 
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