Quote:
Originally Posted by Ether
Looks interesting ! Have you (successfully) tried this?
I do wonder, however, how stable the pulse width is. On an old Pentium my DOS-based generator had jitter in the nanosecond range.
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I've used EMC2 on Linux.
I tried that out once a while back and forgot about it.
I am in the middle of considering EMC2 for something I am working on.
At the time it moved the R/C hobby servo.
You can tell it was extensive testing
Odds are high I will have to dig up an old PC in the near future.
When I have some life out of it I'll let you know and a test can certainly be made.
Depending on what is actually providing the parallel port it is possible to get some pretty tight timing.
I've had decent luck with NetMOS PCI parallel port boards.
The timing is basically the hinderance for Mach3/EMC2 and so many other PC based CNC controllers with USB output.
With USB you need more intelligence on the USB slave device.
That has to be the case because USB is so complex the timing goes out the 'window'.
There are USB controllers out there but then you have yet another part in your CNC system (usually $100+ at that)
As Windows moves into 64bit Microsoft seems to heading towards obsoleting parallel ports.
I know EMC2 can drive industrial servos with PWM off the parallel port however there's usually an interface with an FPGA.