Re: Stepper controllers

Ian W. Wright wrote:

>
> From: "Ian W. Wright" <Ian@...>
>
> Hi Andrew,
>
> Sorry I have taken so long to get back to you but I have been away for a
> couple of weeks.
> I am not trying to do any more than persuade the steppers to run
> reliably. Using the Pentium I can get about 150 rpm out of the motors
> without losing steps but, using the 486, I can only get reliable
> stepping at about 50 rpm and then only on selected motors. The 486 I was
> using only had a 486/66SX chip in and so I wonder if the problem was due
> to the lack of a maths co-processor (as in the DX chip)? I was running
> the computer in Windows '95 DOS mode from the hard disk and using 16Mb
> of RAM.
> I did use the Timeset program to set the initial parameters for MaxNC
> and fiddled with the corresponding settings in the Stepster program.
> Using the Pentium the motors just fly but I was hoping to be able to use
> the 486 so as not to tie up the Pentium which could be better employed
> elsewhere.
>
> Ian

All this talk of Pentiums and 486s bring up a question. The "Retrotec"
controler uses a 8080 cpu and 64k of ram. Why do you need so much more
to do what this early controll does?

John Grant