Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Re: Black box ??

Parallel ports are going away. Except as add in PCI cards which of course
will
require drivers as it's not a legacy implimentation and can't be decoded in
the
standard legacy I/O space. A year from now I would think it will be very
very difficult
if not completely impossible to find an off the shelf PC or system board
with a legacy parallel port on it. It is possible to write a driver to
intercept parallel port I/O calls and route it to a PCI based parallel port.
But, that's not the most robust way to handle an I/O port. Not to mention
the problems that can be introduced by other drivers trying to do I/O
intercepts.

There will be hundreds of thousands of older PC's with the existing parallel
ports out there. But to run the latest / greatest / fastest, you will have
to find a different interface.

It won't be long until we'll be "legacy free".

USB 2.0 will be a good option. 10 / 100 Ethernet will be a good option.
Firewire will be an ok option but not implimented on as many PC's as a
standard interface like USB and Ethernet will. PCI will be an option for
many years. However, the 2.3 PCI standard was just released which
automatically made 5 volt only PCI cards non compliant with the latest PCI
spec.

Parallel and serial has always been and will continue to be a BAD choice for
CNC ports.

Personally, I would pick USB 2.0 and PCI. USB 2.0 is backwards and forwards
compatible with USB 1.0. You can put a 2.0 device on a 1.0 port or a 1.0
device on a 2.0 port. To get the highest speed you'll need a 2.0 device on a
2.0 port.

later,
Larry E.

----- Original Message -----
From: <batwings@...>
Subject: Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Re: Black box ??

> What bottlenecK? Using I-LPT, a 486 20 megger will generate over 40,000
> steps sec. Or at least so sez the I-LPT speed testing function itself.