Re: Hi, NC Newby

hi Kurt,

the main reason that you find little or no systems to run under Visual Basic
on windows 95 is that the system can pause periodically for "higher priority"
tasks. this behaviour cannot be easily stopped and would cause severe
problems if machining a surface. in coil winding the loss of an occasional
coil may be tolerated but the incentive to provide the software is not there.

accomplishing the geared behaviour you want between the spindle and the wire
guide is easy, especially for simple ratios. i think it is obvious, but will
just state that you use count pulses for the spindle and if your ratio is
10 to 1 then for every tenth pulse to the spindle motor the wire guide gets
one pulse. ramping up and down is also conceptually simple, your software
uses a fixed reference clock and for starting at the lowest speed it counts
say 100 clock times and issues an output step to the spindle motor. the
increment of how many clock times to wait is decremented and after 99 clock
times then next step is output and so on until the number of clock times
corresponds to the step frequency of the final speed you want the spindle
to run. at this count, the decrement loop is turned off and the spindle
runs constantly at the highest speed. of course, since the wire guide is
just a ratio from the spindle motor, it's speed ramps up exactly with the
spindle speed.

hopefully someone else on the list will be able to point you to a solution
using your desired software within your budget. commercial products
are available that will run with a VB front-end and include interface
boards inside your computer and the driver boards and motors, but all i
am aware of are several times your budget.

-ron wickersham

On 11 May 1999 pyroware@... wrote:

>
> My main question lies in software. I am a very good Visual Basic programmer, and I want this system to work under windows 95. Most software requires DOS Basic or C, which I really want to avoid. I can write to the parallel port, etc. Can anyone poin


t me to a manufacturer who sells reasonably priced hardware, and software libraries which will allow me to accomplish this task? Is programming a soft acceleration difficult with steppers? I'd like to keep the cost of the NC portion under $1,000. TIA,


I hope one day to be able to contribute to this group!
>
> Kurt Bjorn