Re: Re: motion control chips

At 09:40 AM 7/21/99 -0700, you wrote:

>From: Alan Rothenbush <beer@...>
>
>> From: "Elliot Burke" <elliot@...>
>> Subject: motion control chips
>>
> I came across the HCTL-1100 General Purpose Motion
>> Control IC.
>> It has lots of features, is intended to control stepper , DC, or DC
>> brushless motors, has encoder inputs. It does all the motion control
>> calculations, and can be synchronized with other HCTL-1100's.
>> It has a 24 bit counter, which beats most of the decoders I've looked at.
>>
>> This may be the right chip for a motion control board.
>>
>There are a number of companies producing such chips, with PMD ( Performance
>Motion Devices ) being perhaps the leader in this field. They are all close
>to magic devices, methinks, IF A PERSON DOES NOT HAVE A MODERN PC.
>>
>Remember, these chips only replace a small part of the CNC program, the part
>that takes a direction/velocity instruction and produces step pulses. The
>only hardware they replace is a parallel port and one channel of a DRO board.
>( i.e., 1/4 of Tom's design/Dan's board ), while requiring a PCB of their
>own.
>
>Now, if we were still all using 8088 based XTs, these chips would look pretty
>good. Since Pentiums are almost free, they're not as pretty .
>
>Alan
>
>--
>
>Alan Rothenbush | The Spartans do not ask the number of the
>Academic Computing Services | enemy, only where they are.
>Simon Fraser University |
>Burnaby, B.C., Canada | Agix of Sparta
>

Hey Alan,
I agree with you. A good engineer wants to know how much it is going to
cost. The Spartans, who would call you, me, and the Athenians just wimps,
are dead because they were too macho to ask the number of problems
(enemys). The cowardly Athenians, even while slaves of the Romans, shaped
our entire world. Good engineers are cowards, not Spartans. Cowards live
long enough to reproduce, and eventually to change the world.