Eckler Software

Description

In June 2009 I released my first hardware product called rt-stepper. This product is a USB-to-parallel port dongle for CNC controller boards. My old CopyImage, MetaGif and CopyCom products have been in-active for sometime now so these products have been officially retired. The rt-stepper USB-to-Parallel dongle is a special dongle designed specifically for CNC controllers. This dongle provides CNC parallel port support and real time stepper motor control. You can use this dongle to convert a parallel port CNC controller into a USB CNC controller. Most CNC controllers are designed to be driven with a PC parallel port. Unfortunately parallel ports are thing of the past and many new PCs have no parallel port. Commercial USB-to-Parallel dongles do exist, but these dongles are designed for printers not CNC controllers. CNC controllers require XYZ step/direction signals. With the rt-stepper dongle you can now drive XYZ step/direction signals over the USB bus. Driving a CNC controller with a PC parallel port requires a real time OS otherwise the stepper motors can loose synchronization. With the rt-stepper dongle this restriction is removed. The rt-stepper dongle provides the real time stepper motor control which means you can now use your favorite OS such as Linux, Mac or Windows. Each dongle provides a step resolution of 46,875 Hz. USB IO is faster and more reliable than parallel port IO. Since each rt-stepper dongle has it's own real time processor multiple CNC controllers can be driven by one PC. For example if you have a dual core PC you can drive two CNC controllers with two dongles on one PC. Most commercial gcode interpreters do NOT support laptops with parallel port chipsets. This is not a problem with the rt-stepper dongle. You can use any Linux, Mac or Windows laptop or netbook with USB support. Laptops can provide dedicated CNC setups with minimal investment and work space. The rt-stepper software is open source. The software is organized into two software components - application program and library. The application program is a small terminal program that runs CNC gcode files. The library is called by the application for all dongle specific IO. Together they act as a real time stepper motor gcode virtual machine. Both manual and auto CNC operations are supported. The application program's Main screen is showed below, for more screen shots see the rt-stepper External Reference Specification ( ERS ). The rt-stepper application program is similar to the EMC open source project at www.linuxcnc.org. Although the rt-stepper program is not a complete EMC replacement, it is a valid alternative and does NOT require Linux to run. You can run the rt-stepper program on Linux, Mac or Windows. For more information about the rt-stepper program read the ERS . The ERS clearly defines what features are currently supported. Since all the dongle specific code is in the rt-stepper library other developers can integrate the dongle into there own CNC application. The library handles all the dongle specific USB IO for basic linear and circular moves. See the Library Example for a simple program example.

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