Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] EMC2 I/O Cards

vrsculptor wrote:

> Its been a long time since I looked at EMC but I was realy impressed
> by what I saw at Cardinal engineering. Out of curiosity what PCI cards
> does EMC2 currently support for step direction and general IO? Does it
> do step and direction with a G320 and use encoder feedback? Does it
> support threading on a lathe?
> Roger
>

The wiki lists supported hardware:
http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?EMC2_Supported_Hardware

If you want hardware to generate step/dir signals then the pico-systems
boards mentioned by Jon seem to be the only ones supported right now.
There's been talk about an fpga config for the mesa 5i20 that would also
output step/dir signals but so far I don't think it's done.

The idea with gecko or rutex servo drives is that the drive uses encoder
feedback, the computer only outputs step/dir signals, so in a standard
config EMC2 would not use encoder feedback with a gecko or rutex
step/dir servodrive. However there's been some recent talk on the
emc-list about using feedback with these step/dir drives. The
sourceforge mailinglist archives should have the discussion:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=33140

reading an encoder usually requires custom hardware, since the parallel
port can only keep up with a modest count rate.

AW