Re: 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 Run from laptop or outdated kid's computer.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)?
>

Are you not describing a Gecko g100 GRex module ?

John S.