06/04/2008 by peter.

For those who are interested in the wonders of CNC (probably none of you) I thought I would write a quick post to describe wht i have done so far.

AS mentioned here the control board has been replaced and I am controling everything with VB Express 2008. Here is a little more detail

The protocol for the machine

The reason the people who built this machine originally used both parallel and serial comms was because of the amount of data to be transmitted. so to do the same over a single serial link will require some packing. Unfortunately there is no standard way to do this, so therefore there is a requirement for me start by writing a protocol to handle all this info. The basic idea is to use the serial port like an 8 bit wide parallel port. Each byte is then an instruction. The prelim spec for the control protocol is here in OO format. if anyone actually wants to read this in MS Word .DOC format let me know and i will convert it.

After being able to communicate with the machine i needed to write some code to send commands to the machine and, more importantly, create lines and arcs from which everything else can be created. So i wrote some code to implement Bresenham’s line and arc algorithms and then wrote an XML based machine control language (since i am not a G-code fan, i think it is a bit out of date). Once i work out how i am going to do Post the code without it being mistaken for HTML i will post a sample programme in this post but until then you can see the programme that made this drawing here (simply open with notepad)

any more data wanted or people wanting to help develop this software, let me know

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06/04/2008 by peter.

I just noticed that there have been a spike of hits on my site. After a little snooping through the stats i see that slashdong gave me reference. It looks like someone has been reading what i write. Apologies for anyone else who was waiting for the next instalment. I will try and post some more stuff about the progress as things get done. Comments welcome (they let me know that people are in fact reading this stuff since most of my stats say that the visiting browsers are just search engine robots).

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