Re: EMC for windows

[Ray Henry <rehenry-at-up.net>]

On Wednesday 29 January 2003 12:58 pm, Eric wrote:
> There is one counter-example which shows that under certain
> circumstances windows will work in real-time: Mach 1, which is the twin
> of EMC hosted under windows.  

I'm just a bit suspicious of the notion of twin here.  There was a recent 
discussion on CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO that talked about the inability to set 
home switch offsets with that other system.  Seems they left out the home 
position and home offset stuff from any sort of configurable ini.  The 
only thing about it that was a twin is the interpreter and even that has 
forked away from the EMC.

My theory on why that works is that, by
> definition, a step and direction system is open loop stable.  Thus,
> when bill gates has internet explorer dump your hard drive over the
> internet to Redmond, nothing bad happens, because no step/dir pulses
> are output.  By this theory, if Mach 1 were modified to drive a
> servo-to-go based system, the system would probably "go boom"
> occasionally under heavy use.
> Eric
>
> On Wed, 29 Jan 2003 07:50:10, "Markus Meyer" wrote:
> > Johan,
> >
> > using EMC (as a machine controller) on Windows is not possible.
> > That's because Windows doesn't support hard realtime which is
> > essential for machine control. Plain Linux doesn't either, but EMC
> > can use a free realtime extension like RTAI or RTLinux to achieve
> > this on Linux. Some commercial vendors have extended Windows with
> > realtime capabilities in a similar way, but these solutions are
> > expensive and - more important - are not supported by EMC at the
> > moment.
> >
> > It's possible to run EMC in simulation mode on Windows, but since no
> > actual machine controlling can be done in simulation mode, this
> > should be quite useless for your purposes.
> >
> > Anyway, installing EMC and/or Linux can be difficult at first, but it
> > works and it is free. If you are looking for a solution that works on
> > Windows and is more straightforward to install, you can use any
> > commercial motion cards like the ones from Galil
> > (http://www.galilmc.com/ - no specific advertising intended).
> >
> > Hope that helps
> >
> >
> > Markus
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: emc-at-nist.gov [emc-at-nist.gov] On Behalf Of Johan
> > Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 1:00 PM
> > To: Multiple recipients of list
> > Subject: EMC for windows
> >
> >
> > Dear Sir,
> >
> > I am interested  on EMC. I find out it is difficult to use EMC under
> > Linux.
> > Since I am using Windows as my OS, can you please send me the latest
> > Windows version of the EMC software.
> > Thanks in advance.
> >
> > Regarding this software is important for my final project, your early
> > respond is highly appreciated.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > JOHAN