RE: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] I/O for the future

Chris:

Interesting how history plays things out. Initially, I believe that the
"industrial" uses of these small machine far exceeded the office automation
applications. This was when Intel's multibus was king and National
Semiconductor, and a few others, were building clone boards. We used an
Intellec 8-Mod80 and a teletype for program development and burnt everything
into EPROMS.

Then, the PC came out. First as a group of S-100 boards in a chassis and
finally as a toy that IBM built to prove that the small computer didn't
perform nearly as well as their expensive big iron. And everybody jumped on
the bandwagon and made that machine, and its clones a success. The hardware
prices dropped so much that the industrial user jumped on the bandwagon as
well. But, the industrial market is relatively small and too segmented to
drive the design. And, Intel and Microsoft are too busy introducing
"improvements" to maintain their revenue streams to worry about the
industrial user who expects to be able to find repair parts perhaps twenty
or thirty years later.

And, so, we might be comming back to the starting place - separate machines,
purchased at a higher price than the commodity PC's - to obtain the features
necessary for control.

Your idea of the USB to ISA adapter box sounds interesting. However, who's
going to be making the ISA cards in a few years? I suspect that we'll do one
of two things: We'll either start developing controllers that interface
directly to the USB or Fire Wire or we'll go back to separate computers
designed for control applications. Given the economics, I'm betting on the
first alternative.

-- Carol & Jerry Jankura
Strongsville, Ohio
So many toys, so little time



-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Stratton [mailto:stratton@...]
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2001 8:54 AM
To: CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] I/O for the future


A friend and I were talking about the demise of the ISA bus this
morning. (This is in my opinion really unfortunate, as the ISA bus is
a good one for simple hardware - about the only thing that could be
better would be seperate address and data lines). I pointed out to him
that by trying to do real time motion control on a desktop PC we put
ourselves in an interesting position:

We need the fast processors of newer machines to get high step rates,
but we need the I/O capabilities of the 1998 or so models which
typically have <200 mhz processors.

Chris

PS - I wonder if one can optoisolate USB? Actually, running it over
TOSLINK fiber would be cool!

--
Christopher C. Stratton, stratton@...
Instrument Maker, Horn Player & Engineer
22 Adrian Street, Somerville, MA 02143
http://www.mdc.net/~stratton
NEW PHONE NUMBER: (617) 628-1062 home, 253-2606 MIT




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