Smart Motor

hi guys,

i'm a big fan of this group and look forward everyday to reading all
the new posts to gleen as much info as i possibly can, so i can sound
smart to my friends who come over and point at my gear and go, "hey,
what's that...?" and then i say, "well, that's a blah blah blah" like
the charlie brown teacher... hehehe...

anyway, i've finally decided to delve into converting my knee mill to
a CNC powerhouse... well, not so powerful... my idea is at least 3-
axis (x, y, and knee or should it be on the spindle...?)... so what
i've been doing is scouring the net and my motion control magazines
for good ways to make this happen... well, lo and behold i ran across
an old memory of the SMART MOTOR made by animatics
(www.animatics.com)... i find their ad and hit their web site... i've
called and left a message for a local rep to call me back... well, i
think this would be a good and fairly decently cheap solution for me
to convert to... i've a budget for my cnc conversion and its around
$3k, but it looks like with these smart motors i can save half of
that... the nema34 625 oz-in. servo motors i'm looking at are around
$500 each, but they are totally integrated drivers, servo amps, dc
power supply, I/O, etc. etc. and you can daisy chain or network the
motors together...

my only problem in finding out from the rep or you guys is, do i need
a pc-based controller like a galil, delta-tau, etc. to send out the
proper signals to each motor or do i use an msdos based program that
turns my parallel port into a multi-axis controller...?

i'm a big boy, so i can take any critiques that you guys may have
about this setup, but it looks like for me it would be the easiest
way for not having to build a box full of electronics and maintain it
whereas, i can just slap on the motors, plug in the juice to each
one, connect the communications I/O and that's it... what do you guys
think...

Methadras