Re: Servo motor controller project

[John Sheahan <jrsheahan-at-optushome.com.au>]

On Mon, May 27, 2002 at 08:54:11PM -0400, Nic van der Walt wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm working on a free, publicly available servo motor controller. 

sounds actually like servo / stepper, which is good.

which FPGA are you using Nic, and what language?
I can help with verilog if thats useful. 
all my recent work has been Altera. 
Mail me the circuit if you want some comments.

GPL sounds appropriate to me for the fpga guts.

> Q: Why parallel port? It's not good enough!
> 
> A: The parallel port in EPP mode can be as fast as a ISA bus based card,
> and while ISA is dead the parallel port
>     has quite a bit of life left. PCI and USB is to complex to start
> with, but could be a good future addition.
> 

the EPP parallel port can be PCI speed for a PCI board. which means
the CPU does not get busy-waited.
allowing USB as an alternative/option makes sense to me.
I don't really want this kind of board inside my pc. so it should have
an exteral interface. parallel/serial/usb seem to be the choices.

john