Hi,
The smoothstepper has 2 ports that can funtion as parallel ports. Would it be possible to use one port for the mill and one port for the lathe?
I have given this a little thought of late, I am building a new mill but wish to keep my existing mini-mill operating while I test and tune my
new build. So my question is only slightly different to your own....can I run two separate mills independently off the one ESS albeit one at a time?
I think the answer is....yes......but with potential problems.
Firstly Mac4 is designed, although not yet released, to run multiple instances of itself. Have you ever wondered why all Lua scripts need an 'inst'
variable? One day in the future it will be because you could run multiple instances and the variable will become critical. This has not happened yet....
Lets imagine that you have one ESS but two profiles, one profile for each machine.
Mach4 can handle six motors, so you could assign three motors for one machine and three for the other. No problems right?
Mach4 allows only one out-of-band (OB) axis be spindle however. That is to say of the six potential OB axes one and only one will have all
the features that we associate with a spindle, things like m3,m4,m5 and s5000 etc. Thus you could have but one regular spindle in your
two machine scenario. You could have a second OB axis as the other spindle but you would miss on the usual control features we have
become used to. Not withstanding that lack you can use the usual jog features of an OB axis to achieve spindle like behavior.
In my case I'm not really concerned with having an operating spindle on my new build machine....yet. This exercise is only to test my
new build.
I came to the conclusion however that to really monkey with my existing installation is likely to cause me problems with my existing mini-mill,
and it has become critical to my work. I have elected not to do this.
A second option is to have still just the one ESS with two profiles as before but two breakout board assemblies, one for each machine.
It would require that you unplug the ribbon cable(s) from one machine BoB assembly and plug in the alternate BoB assembly.
Not quite as convenient but I suspect very much less likely to cause issues with one machine setup screwing with the other.
It has always been my intention to make my own breakout board, electronics is my thing. My own design would be perfectly tailored to my
machine with regard to balance of inputs and outputs, the circuit characteristics of each input, (24V tolerant?, opto isolated?) and
output (line driver vs single ended?, active high vs active low?, 24V or 5V?). Thus if I advanced the timeline for this project I could
have my two BoB assemblies without any extra purchases.
If you follow this general idea, that is, one ESS, two profiles and two BoB assemblies, you could automate it somewhat that would mean
that you did not have to repeatedly plug and unplug the cables. You could have in each profile one digital output that when set caused
all the ESS IO be directed to one BoB assembly and when unset all IO be sent to the alternate BoB assembly. Would require a dozen or
so tri-state buffer ICs (74lLS125's for example), and some logic to glue it together. If you are handy with electronics I could help you with a design.
Just as a matter of clarification the ESS has three equivalent parallel ports while the nearly obsolete USS early model had only two parallel port equivalents.
Craig
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