Two Machines from one PC

[ngwagwa]

After a PC crash I am looking into using one PC to drive 2 machines at the same time. Has anyone any experience/advice on using one PC to drive two machines?
I intend to use Denford VR Milling to drive one machine via USB and Mach 3 to drive the second machine via a PCI parallel/serial port to drive the second machine.

[magicniner]

Two machines from one PC with each machine running at different times will work, if you try to run Mach3 simultaneously with any other software you are likely to have problems with a conflict for resources.

[ngwagwa]

Cheers.
I was hoping to run them both at once. It will take me a week or so to get everything set up as I will need a mouse,keyboard and monitor next to each machine but as the new PC is a lot faster then the old two put together I will give it a go and report the results

[A_Camera]

Cheers.
I was hoping to run them both at once. It will take me a week or so to get everything set up as I will need a mouse,keyboard and monitor next to each machine

Get a KVM switch. That's what I'd do if I were you.

but as the new PC is a lot faster then the old two put together I will give it a go and report the results

It may work but only if you are not using parallel port but some controllers.

[ngwagwa]

A KVM switch is no use as I have one monitor/keyboard/mouse next to one machine and another set next to the other. There are enough USB ports to connect 2 mice and keyboards just need to get a VGA splitter for the monitors.

I will be using the Parallel and Serial port for the Mach3 machine (these ports are on a PCI card) and a USB port for the Denford machine.

I got the Mach 3 sde of it up and running today and it is only using 2% of CPU and 40% of the memory. Tomorrow I will look at the Denford side of things.

[AndyUK]

I got the Mach 3 sde of it up and running today and it is only using 2% of CPU and 40% of the memory. Tomorrow I will look at the Denford side of things.

One of the things to watch out for is the speed of each machine; I would anticipate that both will work, but they'd both slow down a bit as the USB and Parallel communications each need to perform CPU interrupts (literally what it says on the can - a message comes in, and it forces the CPU to stop what its doing and handle this right now), which might not play well together.

The other issue I see is that with a system running off the parallel port, if there is no command buffer, it relies upon the real-time element to work correctly. Imagine if you're half way through a diagonal move which requires synchronised movement of X and Y, but your PC has to deal with something else halfway between sending these signals - you might get a not so diagonal line - but this is purely speculation! I'm looking forward to hearing about your results :)