EMC Black Box

Hi to List from Oz
I've been a lurker for a few months. Due to time
problems I usually get the posts in digest and really
look forward to checking out each days posts. What a
gold mine you guys are!

To introduce myself I'm a cnc hobbyist with
electronics and hobby machining featuring in past
lives. These days I work with disabled people in an
employment environment often helping by building
custom machines to maximise abilities/productivity and
therefore earning capacity, in addition I've built two
gantry routers one stepper with gecko's and the other
with Rutex S+D servo drivers after a few false starts
I'm about to start a third and the Black Box thread
really caught my attention I would like to throw in my
2 cents worth to see what the guru's think.

Following the SBC line of thought why not a standard
mother board with all the availability and low cost
factors that implies its already got ports coms etc
add network card ,Video card.

Now instead of making EMC ROM based why not plug in a
Flash HDD emulator, plug in a CDROM run the BDI set
everything up to talk to a remote windows computer.

Unplug the cdrom, pack everything in a box together
with your choice of stepper or servo amplifiers. Paint
the Box Black. Bolt the box somewhere onto your
machine then you can forget your using Linux and just
SEE windows

Unless I�ve missed the obvious I think this would work
well. A quick search pulled up this low cost ($59)
emulator at
http://www.tapr.org/tapr/html/Fcfa.html

For me this would cover a lot of wants
Ability to stand alone either kb+monitor or a pendant
and lcd
Full featured motion controller
Ability to Customise ie Open Source
Windows GUI (I like KDE too but MS has a lot of users
hooked)
On going development of the EMC
Low cost.
Simple to update software from the Remote PC or plug
the CDROM again.
Robust Hardware no spinning disks.

Cheers to all
Lloyd Green


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