Re: Floppy-EMC? and some other questions

["Dan Falck" <dfalck-at-sprynet.com>]

Brian,

This sounds like a good idea to me.  The GUI stuff is nice, but not totally
needed.  With the controls off the keyboard, it makes it like a lot of CNC
controls on larger machines.  Without the GUI, could you get more
performance out of older systems?
How about a minimal install that interfaces with another computer via a
network?  Kind of like Fred's idea of the Win CE device (or any other device
for that matter) on the front end and the dedicated motion control PC in the
backround.

Dan
----- Original Message -----
From: bfp <bfp-at-earthlink.net>
To: Multiple recipients of list <emc-at-nist.gov>
Sent: Monday, September 04, 2000 12:45 PM
Subject: Floppy-EMC? and some other questions


>
> I've been doing some fiddling with the EMC-bin distro and it looks like
> it can be shrunk down to fit on the root floppy of a two disk floppy set
> (boot and root disks)
> with the boot disk having the real time kernel and modules
> and the root disk having a compressed ram disk image of the filesystem
> with EMC and not much else ,may need a super-formated disk (~1.7 meg)
> the root floppy would have to be configured for the specific machine it
> would run on for example a stepper based machine would only have one
> of the stepper-mot variations no simulation ,no test utilitys and only the
> old keystick text interface (for now)
>
> by using two floppy drives and editing the init scripts to boot into
> single user mode ( runlevel 1,root access ,no login prompt), mount
> and load the second disk and start EMC you could get by without having
> a hard drive at all and be running the control straight from power up
> (of course it would take a while to boot from floppys)
>
> I havent gotten to far into building a system like this but it has brought
> up a few questions
>
> Q) is anyone working on a better text interface than keystick and if so
>      how can curses be made to display large fonts in a sub-window for
>      the axis coordinate display? I've looked thru the documentation and
>      only found a few refrences to double wide fonts in terminfo but no
>      examples of how to display them with ncurses
>
> Q) is anyone else working on a machine control pannel/pendant?
>      I would like to move many of the basic controls off the screen and
> keyboard
>      I have most of the hardware (pulse hand weel,rotary switches,toggle
>      switches and buttons) and some ideas of how it could be tied in to
>      the PC but havent gotten into the software side of it much
>
> Q) is there any real intrest in a floppy-EMC type system? or would this be
>      a dead end project?I know that a lot of work is going into the GUI
> interfaces
>      and a text interface seems like a step backwards but it does have
many
>      advantages as far as size and ease of setup on the computer(no X
> config)
>
> there are also several Linux mini distros with X that can fit on and be
> booted
> from an IDE or SCSI Zip drive or an LS120 drive ,with the binary EMC
distro
> most of the developement libs/tools can be left out of the system to
greatly
> reduce the system size (down to a reasonable downloadable size ,say ~20MB
or
> less)
> these could keep the GUIs but may be harder to set up on some systems
> so
> Q) are enough people using the super size floptical drives to make this a
> better
>      project to start on than a standard floppy based system?
>
> I know that milti Gig hard drives can be found for about the same price as
a
> floptical drive and one disk ,I'm just seeing how small I can make a
useable
> EMC
> only system squish down to
>
> Brian
>
>
>