Hi, I'm in the planning stage of building a 3 axis router with brushless servos which I plan to run with mach
I was thinking it might be a good idea to take the strain off mach by using a hardware motion board, so I bought quite cheaply an advantech mini industrial pc with a galil 1750 card already installed (and a few galil servo drives included too..) It all appears really clean, like new (the drives are new in their boxes, so it may well all be unused.)
I see from the forum that the mach drivers for galil seem to work well now, which is great (well done everyone who puts their time into this stuff!), so I think I will end up using the card, but the pc is only 233mhz. It's a socket7 board, and it has jumpers to change the core/bus voltages and clock speed, so I think I could get away with swapping the cpu for at most a 550mhz pentium (the fastest cpu supported on a standard socket7 it appears.)
I know 1ghz is the recommended minimum for mach3, but since it won't be actually running the drives directly, is it possible to get away with a slower machine? It won't be running any CAM software, it'll just be in the machine.
It's no big deal if I can't use it, it's just a nice compact chassis to fit into a machine, with filtered fans etc. If I don't use it, I'd need to find a faster motherboard with an ISA slot for the galil (chucked plenty of those out over the years!)
thanks