Hi, am new to Mach 3, but been playing with various cartesian robots over the years, largely due to need to repair them in my lab! have just begun "repurposing" and old Packard microarraying robot, which has high precision x,y,z axes, and a ~750mm x 450mm working area, to use as a cutter/laser table.
Rather than rip out all the old system, and embedded Pc, I'm spending my time tracking down all the interface connections- I only need a bare minimum of course, but it's so well built that it runs the axes perfectly well with Mach 3, soI don't want to have to rewire everything from scratch, all the limits and home switches and E-stop are already working fine with Mach 3 and the galil plugin. the reason I want to convert it is it is truly top quality design- uses closed loop LINEAR servo motors for the x and y axes, through a galil DMC 1832 PCI controller card and a set of APIMotion servo drives, the x and y axis renshaw encoders are 1 micrometer precision (it's original purpose needed this accuracy), and its performing very well. Problem is some of the IO is through an Advantech PCI 1751S DA&C I/O card, it's got 48 channels available so my next task is to find out if I can use this card with Mach 3 as an I/O interface. if anyone knows if some of it's channels can be accessed by Mach3, I'd like to hear.