More info on Smart Motors

okay, i've got a pretty good picture of what is going on with the
smart motor...

first of all its a brushless dc servo with integrated
driver/controller on-board... i've talked to 6 users today and they
said head wasn't a problem or an issue... the on-board controller has
a thermal cut-off past 70 degrees C and they all said even thought
hey push their motors hard, they've never been to hot to touch... 2
guys i talked to are still using the same motors for the last 5 years
without a hitch and all of the other guys are still using their
motors for the last couple of years... so far, just from these guys
i've talked to these motors are pretty tough nuggets that can handle
the work...

now here is the tricky part or maybe not so tricky depending on your
point of view...

you can serially daisy chain the motors together with rs-232 or rs-
485 or you can use animatics rail for serial I/O and power instead of
the daisy chain method... this is a huge, huge plus for me because it
nearly eliminates the need to purchase drivers, a box, all the
wiring, and/or a controller... animatics sells their own proprietary
VNC software for about $1000 and there is a third party developer
that i've talked to personally at www.clemsoft.com that has written a
really nice interface for the smart motor specifically... its still
in beta and has a simulation mode built in... its written for windows
98/nt/2000 and i've downloaded it, but havn't run it yet... he is
pretty dedicated to its development and he an i exchanged lots of
ideas that he seemed fairly enthusiastic about... go check out the
website for the software and email the guy about any info... well, i
guess, that is if you really care...

also he told me that the smart motors will and can use stepper motor
instructions... here are his own words from an email exchange that he
and i had and i must say its very promising and interesting;

"In fact, did you know that any smartmotor can be configured for
pulse/direction input? In this mode, neither the animatics vnc nor my
software will work... but the huge amount of software written for
steppers motors driven from the parallel port, will work better than
ANY stepper ever thought it could work.... And I'm familiar with at
least 10 people who have Dos/Windows based parallel port cnc
solutions and are using it in this mode as well. One warning here...
I doubt if you could get to 300-500 ipm with a parallel port driver
system (since steppers can't do 5000 rpm like the smartmotors), but
you definitely can with the SmartMotor."

personally i think i've found my solution to my cnc retrofit... the
software looks like it will do about 80% - 90% of what i want... the
motors are completely in-line with what i've been looking for and i
really don't have to worry about trying to find the magical black
box/voodoo gear... i'm gonna take the plunge and keep you guys
informed as to how it goes... wish me luck and as always i will
entertain any questions or comments...

Methadras