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« on: June 11, 2012, 01:55:30 PM »
Hi Benny,
Heres my opinion on the devices either available now or coming online soon.
I think for lower end stepper machines the Pokeys looks promising.
For machines that require a higher pulsrate the Ethernet Smoothstepper is a good choice.
For more industrial type machines then the controllers that CS-Labs are starting to produce look like they will be a good choics.
Now to reasons,
Pokeys is cheap and although it is only 25KHz pulsing (at the moment anyway) it will be worth watching to see how it develops but if it comes along it should make a nice board for small stepper based machines that dont require a fast pulserate, in addition it has expandability via their expansion port and it also has analogue inputs. All of the I/O however are 5v
Ethernet Smoothstepper is a better device than the USB Smoothstepper, it doesnt suffer any of the problems with communications being droipped that some have seen with the USB version. A lot of the small annoying issues the USB version suffered from have been sorted and the only issue I still have is step/dir spindle control is not perfect. It can, like the USB version, pulse at up to 4MHz and it has 3 full parallel ports worth of 5v I/O where the USB one only had 2 plus 6 extra Inputs.
CS-Labs have a few different devices coming on line and they are more industrial orientated. What makes them look so promising is Ethernet connection, 24v I/O and lots of it with options to expand a lot. Differential Step/Dir signals which help with noise immunity. Analogue I/O which can be used for FRO etc. Also there is an encoder module coming online soon which will be needed for lathe threading but may also provide the possibility of using encoder feedback to Mach for updating DROs on reset or after E-Stop.
Hood