![]() This could be applied to a stepper motor driver and the stepper will move in response to it. Machs native output is step and direction. ![]() Most people get confused and wrongly believe that Mach is a motion controller. Operating at the same time on the same PC. With this setup you have two components, Mach the interpreter/planner and the parallel port/driver Motion controller to be sure but it is still a motion controller. Where a lot of confusion is generated is when you use Machs parallel port because the port and its software driver ARE a motion controller, a fairly modest It passes that trajectory to a motion controllerĪnd the motion controller does the business with servo, steppers, valves, pumps and whatever. Mach is a Gcode interpreter and a trajectory planner. Generally no, Mach is not a closed loop controller. The motors can be steppers or if you can afford them AC servos, as far as Mach goes it doesn't care which. Step and direction pulses to the motor drivers. The combination of Mach and a motion controller, whether the controller is part of the PC or a separate board hooked up by USB or Ethernet, produce On 32 and 64 bit systems but of course you have to buy one, the cheapest are about $100 and the dearest can be up to $2000. They are now pretty well known and work really well They tend to be faster and more accurate. Which use an FPGA or DSP ICs to generate pulse streams. For this reason a number of companies have made external motion controllers That competes with it and it can ONLY be run on 32bit operating systems. The original parallel port is not without its problems, its fairly slow, its timing is subject to some jitter, it can stop altogether if some other software is running The parallel port is an example of a motion controller, ie 'a device that can generate accurate pulse streams'. It does use the old style printer port that's true but the real smart stuff is the code that It was a very clever piece ofĬode and is still used by lots of people and called the 'parallel port'. Machs Pulse Engine or Port Driver almost had to shoulder Windows out of the way to do it. Also the CPU has to make these really accurately timed pulses AND run Windows, Sophisticated hardware timers like industrial controllers and FPGAs. X86 CPUs are not especially good at generating pulse streams, they don't have In the early days this task was done right on the PC by its own CPU. The trajectory is a sequence of numbers that describe a position and velocity over time,Ī motion controller has a table of all the PVT data and its job is to calculate the pulses necessary to make the motors follow the PVT data. ![]() Mach is a program that interprets Gcode and plans a trajectory.
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