Re: EHP External Hardware Proposal

Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2000 14:49:45 -0500

> From: George Fouse <gfouse@...>
> Subject: Re: Re: EHP External Hardware Proposal
>
> Hello,
> I am new to this group, and so please forgive me if I rehash ideas from
> before. Looking at the past few days' posts, it looks like there is a
> desire to get:
>
> 1. A 'black box' back end to take care of 'details' from code
> decomposition down through actual controller driver functions [and
> personally, ......................

I have been thinkng along this line as well. I would eliminate the
entire Xwindow and gui stuff from the EMC/realtime box. I believe a
simple Tcl interface using curses instead of X could give a very useable
system with much of the complication removed. I firmly belive in having
several machines- a PC used to run a milling machine should not also be
running desktop applications.

There is a muLinux package that loads an entire, very functional, linux
off ONE (1) floppy. I use it as my disaster recovery floppy. I dont know
how hard it would be to add the realtime stuff to that, but there are
several vendors that sell rt-linux imbedded boards for just a few
hundred $, where the linux is in rom, or flash.

To link that to the front-end (gui) part of EMC running on anoter
machine it might be a simple hack with the rpc libraries added.
Interesting idea.

wish I had time to persue half of my ideas.

Tiny Tiger
The tiger I used was the US$59 version- 132k flash 132K ram, far more
than I needed to control all 3 step motors. No need to build
coordination network between microprocessors.

INDEXER-LPT
I will re-read the manual there, maybe that would be a nice comand set
to emulate in hardware- there are already several programs around that
use it.

ron