Interface. Gauging interest.

I make a living designing high end embedded processors.

It's like physical pain seeing people controlling units with PCI cards and
printer ports. From my perspective, if you're selling a multi-hundred dollar
servo motor you can at least design in a modern control interface. So why
not? USB is cheap. Heck I could do it in my <cough>copious</cough> spare
time.

And I've seen plenty of computers come out without any other interface. For
that matter, both of my laptops lack printer ports, to say nothing of a pci
slot.

And lots of cheap microcontrollers have multi-channel DACs and ADCs,
especially automotive units. I just did a quickie design using a Freescale
MPC5554, which sells for under $50 and contains everything you need, and you
could probably run it all from the power available from the port (5 watts).

Anyway, software guy I know says he can do the code in just the onboard
memory to do the control loop, and I told him that USB2.0 is plenty fast
enough for real-time control of the axises and he wouldn't have to do that
much, leaving the PC to do the number crunching.

So I'm envisioning a box plugged in to a USB port, no external power, and
able to control an entire machine's worth of servos or steppers and
associated sensors. Run from laptop or outdated kid's computer. Get some
Linux wiz to write an EMC2 driver and you're in business.

How much would a box like that be worth? Figure an enclosure like a Gecko so
you can bolt them all up together.

What if it included the power amps all in one package? Figure six output
channels and a USB interface. Six Geckos have about $300 worth of parts,
tops (not including the box.) Would it be worth it to you to have it all in
one box, connected to any old computer with a USB?

With a faster CPU, you could run a real-time Linux on the box itself and
take high-level commands over ethernet. I'm pretty sure you could even get
EMC2 running on a gumstix (http://www.gumstix.com) and use any computer on
the network as an X server to run it.

There's plenty of high end stuff that have PCs embedded in them, but why
reinvent beer for the thousandth time? Get rid of the ruggedized keyboard
and display and move it over to a comfy chair at your desk.

So,

1. How much would you pay for a USB I/O box to control servos (requiring
Gecko or equiv to drive the motors)?

2. How much would you pay for this USB I/O box if it had all the drive
electronics?

3. How much would you pay for a box slightly larger with a built in computer
running EMC2 and communicating with a shop Ethernet network?


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