Good day:
I too would like to know the current status on the Galil plugin. Am looking at the DMC-1836 3 axis or DMC-1846 4-axis PCI card for a vertical turret lathe. The VTL has shaft encoders on the ballscrews. Will Mach3 accept the output from the encoders via the Galil card and display that on the DRO, and use it for position information, rather than the predicted position?
In other words if an axis has incremental shaft encoders on the axis itself rather than on the servo motor, does Mach 3 use that position information for determining accels, decels and other motion, or does Mach 3 not use this, and instead display the "estimated" or predicted position based on motion commands sent to the Galil?
The Galil card will "close the loop" if the feedback from the encoder on the actual axis is used by Mach via the Galil card.
Another question is the servo motors themselves have encoders to tell the servo drives that the motor has moved, the servo drive will generate a fault signal if the motor does not turn, and can generate pulses as the motor turns; can Mach 3 accept this 2nd encoder input as well? The Galil can accept 2 encoder inputs per axis I believe. The difference between the 2 could be used as the backlash determining value.
In the proposed application, the servo motor is connected by a 21.5 to 1 gearbox, to the ballscrew. There is a small amount of backlash in this motor to ballscrew drivetrain. That is the reason for the encoders on the ballscrews.
To re-iterate, an update on the Galil plugin and its capabilities would be very timely.
Thanks
Jim H