Re: black box specs

Is J.R. Kerr still on this list? He was here a while, and described his
PicServo-CMC.

What I would really like is for him to separate the signal handling
from the servo drive. Then I could take his serial interface and drive a
stepper motor with Dans board, or any other driver, or a Geko servo
drive, or even buy a full PicServo if that fit a particular machine.

Here is the box I want, with the big features spread out over several
version.

1) serial line, with the ability to network several devices as done in
Pic Servo. The 12 axis guys can just use 4 boards chained together.

2) output to be step and dir signals, on a screw terminal block, so I
can drive any stepper board or a Geko servo drive.

The commands needed are:

Some setup commands to set max rates, acceleration values, etc.

Inquire command to get current location. I would call this from VB about
1 per second to update the screen. Obviously this isn't 'real time' but
Im just going to update the pretty picture in the gui. Also this
inquire cannot effect the step rates, so if the box is to busy stepping
the inquire can just wait,

A panic stop (E-stop) command, maybe with one option to stop with
deceleration another to just plain stop.

In V1 I need to be able to send an X,Y,Z tuple, in steps (the pc can
figure out the inch or mm to step conversion). I want the box to do
something like Bresenhans move on all 3 axis. It will send back an ACK
when its done with the move.

In V2 we could add circular interp.

in V3 we could add the ability to fill a buffer with lots of short
moves, and keep the drive moving.

PicServo does all this right now. I could just buy 3 of them ($200 each)
and build my machine. But I would be stuck with just the drive capacity
of Picservo.

I know of at least 3 command sets that I would be happy with- Picservo,
SimpleStep or Indexer.LPT. Indexer might be an advantage because someone
wanting an all software solution could buy indexer, others could buy the
box.

What are the copyright issues if we mimic someone's commands? the
command set is published, is it OK for us to do our own implementation
of it?

I have this working, to what I call the V1 level, on a Tiny Tiger
microprocessor. I stopped working on it because I don't want to be in
the hardware business. Obviously this can be done on a PIC, since
PicServo does it.

ron ginger