Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Re: Cutting a totem Pole

On Tuesday 06 August 2002 05:23 pm, Fred wrote:

> It is
> rumored that EMC will contour more, but I heard it on a pretty good
> authority today that the source for this might be "missing". ( If
> anyone knows where the 6 axis source version of EMC is located,
> please post it. thanks)

As far as I know, all the source code for the EMC is in the Sourceforge
repository, and any software upgrade involves building everything from source
so if something was missing there'd be hell to pay.... As far as 5 & 6 axis
control goes, you've seen a hexapod running with the EMC and that's 6 motors,
but not really six axes (the hexapod only supports X, Y, and Z for now). I've
done coordinated 4 axis moves (X, Y, Z, A), but I've never tried hooking up
more than that. One possible problem might be that the hexapod module outputs
4 axes worth of step & direction signals on the D0-D7 signal of the printer
port and the other two axes on C0-C3. I don't know if the regular steppermod
or freqmod modules have axes 5 and 6 mapped to any output pins. If not, it
shouldn't be a big deal to add them. The latest version of the interpreter
supports six axes. The EMC does have problems with feed rate control for
rotary axes (see the other thread on this subject for more details on why
it's a problem). At one point the CIA was concerned that the EMC code
violated some law (it's the blah-blah act, I can't remember the name) that
controls the export of machine tools with more than 4 axes, but they decided
that it was OK to share the code with folks over the internet because there's
a lot more to building multiaxis machine tools than just the software. I'm
glad of this because some of our foreign users and developers are very
valuable contributors to the project, particularly Paul Corner over in
England.

If you could elaborate on what you were told, I can find out anything you
want to know.

Thanks,
Matt