Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Mach3 & laptops

This will work fine.
The interface will be a bit slow, but more than good enough.

The usb stuff referenced before was correct.
Usb is not and cannot be time-correct. It is fast. So for video etc.
that is a buffered non-time correct data stream its easy.
Note that mach works like a video frame capture card at the frame buffer
level, not the data storage level.

Video is usually dealt with on a frame level, at 50 frames/sec, of about
70 kB each.
Machine control is approx 1000 times faster (and smaller) - and a 3%
jitter only 1% of the time makes it useless.
Ms delays in networking and so on are insignificant, as they are in
serial comms (at most about 2-3 Mbits/sec) with about 0.1 -1 1 ms
latency typical serial comms.

Machine controls deals with, in mach, a 40 usec pulse stream. About 25
times faster.
No usb converter solution will work. Technical reasons that cannot be
changed, has to do with pc hardware etc etc.
No "usb driver solutions" will work - mach runs the port directly
without a driver at kernel level - thats what makes it work, real time,
very well. It also means no sw plug will work in between.
A usb solution that runs as a parallel port could be made - as far as
anyone knows one does not exist at any price point. It would be
specialised hardware, and not trivial, as from the pc hw point of view
it would have to look like a bog-std parallel port. It would need a
special card or motherboard. It would be very expensive to develop.

Some intelligent non-real time usb controls work.
They are complex, and almost ready after 16 months development.
The most popular new one, seemingly best one, is the smoothstepper or SS
from warp9.

Some things are still hard to do with ss or don´t work - I believe
integrating with a simultaneous pp for io, some probing, some mpg´s
issues, threading seemingly is working from only about 1 month ago
(after 10 months delays ...) and so on ... its very much more complex
than you would think.

At the moment any and all pieces exist. The sw is good. Almost anything
can be done. Its not too hard, but there are very many bits and pieces.
No easy, multiple, cheap, easy single box solution exists that supports
multiple io, mpgs, threading, and analog io.

Complex solutions that work fairly well seem to be integrating modio
with parallel ports, ss with limitations, pp and pokeys, joysticks, pp
with plc, extra io cards and so on.
For 99% of use a ss seems to be good, fast, stable, by all reports. Its
likely to become the best solution.
At the moment, dual pc parallel ports is the easy, stable, fast
reliable, for 99% plus of uses and basic io of about 15 bits/ports + 4 axis.

Probably a ss will surpass this soon.

Danny Miller wrote:

>
> 'K looks like the system has an AMD Geode NX 1750 (1.4GHz) processor,
> 40GB HDD, and 655360K RAM. Good?
>
> Well the price was right... free! Now I've got 3 systems I picked up
> and the other 2 are totally obsolete/missing stuff. Huh now that I'm
> looking at it this may need a new power supply it doesn't wanna start
> after it's been running we'll work on that. But when I had it running
> it loaded up and all, problem was it had a password-protected install of
> NT so I couldn't do much.
>
> Danny
>
> gcode fi (hanermo) wrote:
> >
> > Danny - its a common problem.
> >
> > Over last 5- years, I have seen laptops tried by lots of people.
> > Art, the sw creator, says laptops cause 99% of all support requests.
> > Ie they are 100x more likely to not work than a given desktop.
> >
> > There are lots of good technical reasons, Jon E, who is very good at
> > this stuff, explained some well.
> > And the reasons really are technical ie valid and immutable.
> >
> > Conclusion - don´t try laptops, of if you do, many (exasperated) people
> > will say we warned you.
> > A mini-itx is good and cheap, like the shuttle boxes.
> > Any cheap box is fine - add a video card if it does not work with
> > onboard. Onboard may be fine, many are.
> >
> > At least 1 ghz processor, around 2 ghz is good.
> >
> > xp is easiest / most common. win2k may be ok. Few use it and driver
> > support is so-so.
> > Vista is bad but doable.
> >
> >
>