RE: servos

Dean,
With a block diagram, I can offer some support in specific ways, without spoiling the soup. There is some real value in 4 quadature inputs and 24 bits of I/O for under $100 to many efforts. One area of responsibility I can make contributions in, may be with programmable logic. If needed, I will create JED files in CUPL or ABLE for logic which might provide quadature to up - down counter blocks, or high speed interfaces, as required.

Where a micro-controller falls short of speed, programmable logic can pre-process tasks, in a similar manner as the companion chip sets do for a micro processor (as you probably know). Obviously, such logic takes up the slack in all sorts of application problems like this
and is perhaps useful in the nature of this task.

As people begin to smell the soup, I hope we don't end up with another $600 board, as there are several already available. A $100 4 channel quadature building block should fit many black box efforts, where all sorts of the other I/O functions exist in many other cards. If you can put together a linux driver with such a card development, there should be enough interest to attack the NRE for a run of boards.

What effort are you undertaking that such a development might fit? How will the project help you solve your requirments?

David Howland