I've kinda wanted to get into developing a motion controller since the printer port has been "problematic". I do have significant microcontroller experience.
Now I asked about ModBus but from what I was told, it directly tries to write pulses so it's subject to the same problems if there's any glitches in the smoothness of the databus as the parallel port is. My drivers suck anyways and being the tech guy I am would probably try to build drivers too, even if it costs more than buying them.
Ideally I'd expect to see some sort of format with either a more compact description of the operation- such as "513 pulses on this driver with this direction at this freq" and/or timestamps, and some sort of flow control so the sent commands will neither overrun nor underrun the controller's receiver.
I could always just modem over the G-code. But there's a LOT of commands in G-code that might come up, and this basically removes Mach3 and all its useful functionality from the picture. No, I still want Mach3 here, just talking to a controller through a completely reliable link.
I looked at some of the Mach3 plugins but I didn't see where they were actually documented so you could actually build a controller using it. Are they intended to be proprietary, or did I just not look hard enough for documentation?
Are there good documented, open protocols that Mach3 uses that we can use to reliably talk to the controller?