Re: Smart/Dumb box again...

Dave,

You might want to check out the yahoo group CNCplayer. A man from
germany is doing precisely what you describe. He is HPGL oriented (as
are many do-it-yourself cnc European developers). Many of the posts
are in German, BUT the developer reads/writes clear English. He is in
what we would call "beta" phase...

Hope this helps.

Ballendo

P.S. For your proposed technique, the interpreter side is already
written; EMC. The canonical functions output from the interpreter
could become your "tokens"...

>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.<snip>
>Anyway, that set me to thinking about what could be realizable with
>the more modern junk and some sharp programming. Any thoughts?
>Dave Kowalczyk