Re: EMC with intelligent stepper controllers

[John Guenther <jguenthe-at-nafis.fp.trw.com>]

Matt,

Step rates are set by commands which allow you to set the maximum step rate,
slope, beginning and ending velocity etc with a maximum step rate of 14,329
steps per second.  Syncing the different axis boards will need to be handled
the same as it is by most stepper systems, in the control software.  Each axis
has a dedicated 22MHz processor which handles the generation of the step
pulses and monitors the home and limit switches.  They require a single supply
voltage range of 7.5 to 45.5 VDC at up to 2 amps per phase.  The high current
versions of the boards can handle up to 6.25 amps per phase at the same
voltage ranges.  You can have up to 16 boards on a single serial port so in
theory you could have a 16 axis machine, although I have no idea what that
would be.  Also available are 2 axis quadrature encoder boards which use the
same serial interface scheme.  Check out
http://www.simplestep.com/SimpleStep2000/motion_control.html for more
information.

John Guenther

Matt Shaver wrote:

> > From: John Guenther <jguenthe-at-nafis.fp.trw.com>
> > I have a question for this list.  If I wanted EMC to work with an
> > intelligent stepper controller, one that requires commands such as
> > X1M1000 to move the X axis 1000 steps, where would that type of driver
> > need to be implemented in EMC?  Does that require a replacement for
> > steppermod.o or freqmod.o or is there some place else that would need to
> > be changed?
>
> I think you need to modify steppermod to or freqmod to send the motion
> commands out to the serial port, rather than toggling bits on the parallel
> port. If you tell the board to step X 1000 times, how does it know the step
> rate? Is there some way to sync the different axis boards?
>
> Matt