breakout board usb or parallel

[Robin Hewitt]

I have looked at USB devices and do not like them as you are tied to the one developer who has written in stone how it works and looks

That's why I write my own. Nothing quite like having well commented source code when things go wrong

This is fresh in my mind because my current system is limiting me and about to get rewritten. I want the industry standard, up to date processor. Has to be ARM 32 which is cheap as chips, goes just as fast as you like, loads of goodies and oodles of I/O pins. Also tempted to go Ethernet like the big boys.

These new smilies are crap :frown-new:

[John S]

That's why I write my own. Nothing quite like having well commented source code when things go wrong

So again you are tied to the one developer ?

[Robin Hewitt]

So again you are tied to the one developer ?

Absolutely, but when things go wrong I don't just send a hopeful email and join the queue

[Nugget]

bit late to the thread. interesting about mach3 and the system timer enabling real time control. I wondered how that worked since desktop OS'es are not supposed to be real time. is this an issue with Linux CNC (emc2)? in fact I thought it made sense that an external controller did the well controlling since that was the only thing it had to do. I was wondering if you had any experience with the Smoothie project. it runs on a low cost ARM board and contains its own g-code interpreter.