Smart/Dumb box again...

To all,

Had a thought today (dangerous, I know..!) Back to that black box
we were discussing a month or two ago...

Instead of using special hardware - how about, say, running a tight
assembler program on an old 386 or 486 PC to do two things:

- Read tokenized commands from the COM port
- Control steppers, limit switches on the parallel port

This way, whatever's running the interpreter can just send very
general commands to the "workhorse" computer that takes care of the
rest and handshakes when it's done.

Some back of the envelope figuring tells me that smooth pulses up
to about 500kHz should be pretty easy to achieve, hooking interrupts
and such of course. I was surprised this week to find that my old
VIC-20 driven servo controller ran in about 200 bytes of assembly
language.

Seemed like more at the time, you know? :) Anyway, that set me to
thinking about what could be realizable with the more modern junk and
some sharp programming. Any thoughts?

Dave Kowalczyk
Ames IA