Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] PMAC Controllers

> I have never had a PMAC fail, nor have I ever burned up a motor.

I had a heck of a time chasing down a failed optoisolator on a home
switch input of a turbo pmac last year. No idea how it failed (it had
worked fine for months, and there were not recent changes to that part
of the setup), but as we were not using all the channels I just used a
spare input and wired the output of that optoisolator in place of the
one that failed.

The PMAC is molre versatile and perhaps cheaper than something like a
servo-to-go card which doesn't include any smarts. On the downside,
the smarts of the pmac are all embedded, so it can be difficult to
coordinate with another motion related task running on a different
embedded processor. For our application, we'd probably be better off
writing custom extensions to EMC, but the machine is already built
around a pmac so we make do.

Chris

-------------------------------------------------
Christopher C. Stratton
Engineer, Instrument Maker, and Horn Player
ccs@... 617 628 1062
http://web.mit.edu/~stratton/www/brassbuild.html