Re: G-Codes to Stepper Pulses?

Hi Sambik

A friend of mine called Kevin Carroll who trod that path a little while ago
and spent several years in the process - he died of cancer before he
finished it.
Kevin was VERY knowledgable about all matters CNC including methodology,
maths and other areas that CNC outsider just does not think about.
He used Basic and taught himself much about the language as he went along.
Kevin's work is still in use around the world and his source code and
explanations are available at
http://www.metalworking.com
(Look in the shareware area.)

The reason Kevin spent so much time on this in his final years was because
it was meant for people like us, the hobbyist and small shop owner - he
would not have done it if when he started, products that cost $99 with full
functionality existed.
Kevin never did fully resolve the problem with timing.
From that perspective, Bob Campbell's advice Kirk to use Indexer LPT as
basis is sound advice.


From my respect for Kevin,I tried to carry the torch when he died, getting
permission first from his employer, whom Kevin had left the copyright to
(and who turned not to not to know much about the work) his emplyer was
happy for the project to continue in Kevin's memory as long as it continued
in the spirit that Kevin had intended.

Kevin was not married and had no family to contact - he was a loner, soI
tried to track down his only friend - an old guy called Bill I think, to
get his permission as the only person close to him in lieu of family. I
never did find him.
Steve Stallings of metalworking.com had corresponded with Kevin when he
wanted to make the shareware available and was happy to support the effort.
It was then that I stumbled upon Charles Gallo, he was into machining was
into CNC but was also a VB programmer, I proposed the idea to Charles who
graciously took up the challenge and thus the Stepster project is still
alive. Charles has been through the code and cleaned up many areas, watch
out for build 5 sometime soon.
If you MUST write your own, you can look at the Kevins Stepster source code
and CNC tutorial - it will be a great start.

If you want results now at minimal cost and real performance you can use
EMC - a linux based product developed by NIST and in the public domain with
source code - it is to professional stanadard (some areas are still under
development)

My recommendation though is to echo what Bob C. also advised, - for $99 you
can have CNC Pro http://pwp.value.net/yeager/cncpro/index.html a near
real-time 4 axis system that will serve your needs very well indeed.
The choice is yours:)


Mo