Is there a way to get rid of the annoying underlining of posts? Every word you folks have written in your threads is underlined for some reason??? Wierd.
OK, Brian, I have a quick question for you. Can you point me to this board by Ron Rogers. I'd like to read more about this and to better understand how this integrates in with the control. Specifically, you mentioned that a plugin you wrote for the card provides positional information back to the control. What is the control doing with this. My understanding is that because Mach is open-loop, it has no capacity to use this type of information.
The next question I have is related to your comment about how Fanuc and other machines work. I am baffled because you have stated that they work in an identical fashion as the open-loop Mach. But those systems do not have pixie interfaces in them. The encoder feedback is fed directly into the control and the PID is performed within the control. If your contention is that the internals of the control are doing the same thing as the Pixie, then I would agree with that. One way or the other a PID has to be performed on a servo based system. So long as the following error can be accurately monitored and error trapped, I personally don't care too much about where this is performed. Of course, having it inside the control does give one a bit more flexibility in configuration.
Finally, I am confused about the comment regarding the digital drives. I have heard a myriad of different comments regarding this. Some state that steppers are coming back into vogue. Others claim that the manner in which the control indicates the desired position is changing, specifically to a digital format. I guess that I really don't care one way or the other. I would agree that the digital invocation of position is probably becoming much more popular, but servos still seem to rule the roost over steppers... I'm curious about your thoughts on that though.
I'd love to hear your comments on these... I am one of the (more vocal) members in the thread that Sean was describing before. For the record, I think Mach is a great product. I am less thrilled about making anything on a Windoze platform though. I just don't trust that. For that reason, I am actually more of an advocate for doing this project in EMC than Mach. However, I have also readily acknowledged that doing the project in Mach would be faster and hence that is attractive. In the long run, however, I think I would ultimately move it to EMC for the previously described reasons. The (ultimate) donation to Mach would be easily given as I think the application should be supported.
I guess that is about it.... If you can provide links to any useful tools/accessories/interface boards/etc, that would be great....
Oh, one last thing.... I spend my days in VS2005... I am assuming that this is OK too? Sometimes the upgrade path between 2003 and 2005 is a little "murky", so I thought I should ask....
Alan
P.S. Just for kicks, I am currently looking into Mono to see if I could use .Net for EMC.... That should be "interesting"