I hope this is the right place to ask,
Is there a plugin for mach that would work with a galil dmc 1040? This is an ISA bus card & someone told me ISA is too slow for Mach.
I downloaded the galil plugin off this site and when I start mach it tells me the galil plug in is defective. I want to set up a Bridgeport R2E3 with mach and the galil card.
 I read somewhere someone mentioned a galil .dll from galil's site. Do I need to download that too?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Cutmore

I am setting up a Galil  DMC-1760 ISA card today, and I'd like to know if this is supported by Mach3 as well.

comments?

I asked a few years ago about supporting the DMC-1040 since there are so many on the surplus market. I'm guessing the demand isn't sufficient.

The ISA bus isn't a problem unless one is trying to send the S/D pulse train through it. That would defeat the purpose of the board.

Hi,
I read somewhere, I think it was on this site. That someone was able to get a 17xx series card to work with Mach. I believe it is because it can use the latest Galil drivers V7, which do work with Mach. The Dmc 1000 series cards are not using the same drivers.
I know Art replied on the yahoo group that he had tried to get the dmc1000 card to work but it was too slow and it could not be done!

Hope that helps.
P.S. I have a DMC 1040 also so if you come across something that works, please let me know.
Thanks,
Cutmore

The DMC-1040 series used a Motorola 68331 CPU which, even by today's standards, is a fast controller.  The encoder registers are capable of 8mHz quadrature input.

The only way I can see a speed problem is if one is trying to dump S/D pulses through the bus, or trying to use the Galil windows driver. The first approach reduces the board to a very expensive S/D-to-analog converter. The second is fruitless.

FWIW, numerous companies (mine included) attempted to build a PC-based CNC around the DMC-1040. The only one that succeeded was Camsoft.  They did it with aggressive marketing, not with a functional product.  Galil Basic was not a good platform for CNC, though it could be made to work in DOS. The windows driver was a joke because it used a windows timer and was not predictable. The board runs best as a standalone which is useless in CNC applications.

If you want to make use of the board you can always tie the S/D pins from the parallel port to the aux encoder inputs and then tell the axis' to follow them. Of course you will be back to the S/D-to-analog converter thing and you still won't have a closed loop between the drives and control, nor a decent homing sequence. Might as well use Geckos or Rutex.

I'm installing a Galil DMC1760 with Mach3.  Install went well and I can configure the servo axis without any problem.  Question is how do I access the I/O on the DMC card?  Art suggested that I should be able to map the parallel port pin config to the DMC card somehow.  Any ideas?
tom_emag

In Mach Ports&Pins:

Port 1-Input 1 is the Galil Input 1 and Port 1 - Input 2 is Galil Input 2, (etc) same for outputs

So in Mach Inputs tab, you would set Input 1 to Port 1, Pin 1 etc, the outputs are set the same, which seem strange if you try to compare it to a parallel port but its not really as Galil lables the built in I/O as Input 1/Output 1. In other words on the Mach Output tab Set Output 1 to Port 1, Pin 1.

make sure you also enable them or they wont work (enable the limits too while your at it). The Galil plug-in takes care of getting the all the limits and homes mapped to the correct place in Mach you just have to enable them in Ports & Pins.