[Emc-users] Intro and Hardware Controllers

[Colin F. M. <cfm...@rt...>]

Hi All, I am new to the listgroup. I have considerable experience in
c/c++, asm, electronics, fpga, device drivers (linux), embedded systems,
servo control and robotics. I am looking forward to participating in the
EMC2 project.
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I have a cnc machine that I am building. I just did a "pencil test" and
scribed the "EMC2 Axis" sample using EMC2 Live CD. I was amazed at how
well EMC2 worked over the windows counterpart!!! The real-time
extensions really work! I am using a 4-axis parallel port stepper driver
board now. I am not a fan of using the parallel port for IO, it's too
limited. (However, I am impressed with emc2's performance using it.)
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Going forward, I will be looking into embedding EMC2 controller portions
into an embedded processor board. Thus, my cnc will be accessible over
usb or a network connection. The cnc will also have a small screen
(digital read out - DRO), and manual input controls. Sometimes I may
drill/mill just using the manual input controls and no g-code
programming. Remote control of the cnc mill would use the GUI parts of
emc2 on a separate computer, either linux or windows, connecting to the
cnc mill over the network.
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For the embedded controller I may use a mini-ATX board and a switching
12v atx power board (it's super quite and small) and with a flash
emulated hard drive. (I already have this lying around.) I can set this
up with ubuntu and have a networked cnc controller. I would use a PIC or
Atmel perhaps to interface input controls and provide DRO. Some
programming with HAL modules would be necessary for the DRO and input.
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Perhaps a good PCI board for EMC would be popular. I would use an FPGA
to interface to PCI and provide hardware accelerated blocks, GPIO, ADC,
DAC and stepper outputs (or optionally servos). No more parallel port
and plenty of expansion capabilities. Hardware configuration of the fpga
would be uploaded from the host through the PCI interface.
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Second option, I am finishing an fpga board now. It will be capable of
running uc-linux, with SRAM, Flash, SD-Card, PCM Sound Codec, USB and
can be interfaced to a display and input controls directly using the
FPGA signals. This board is 3" square. This would be my preferred method
since it is small and compact and has extra room in the fpga to
implement hardware EMC controllers. I am not sure if the emc2 code would
compile on a uclinux dist (non-GUI parts). FPGA I hope would be fast
enough if it included hardware accelerated components. I had put 100Mbit
Ethernet on the board, but opted to remove it and possibly later go with
wireless instead (there are some good wireless chips coming out.) The
board is meant for other network appliances and wireless is really the
way to go on network appliances.
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I would love to hear what other people would like?
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Cheers,
Colin
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