[Swansea Hackspace] An old PC with parallel printer port?

[Graham Owens]

That should read stepper & spindle drivers

On 16 September 2014 10:07, Graham Owens <grahamowensuk at googlemail.com>
wrote:

> Well perhaps us hardware types could meet up one night during the week to
> get it up and running or at least figure out the best way to run it.  It
> currently has stepper spindle drivers built in, just needs pulse/dir
> signals to control it - spindle speed is currently manual, although i have
> been building a pwm controller for it.
>
> PS Ceri, people who use USB -> Parallel adapters fall into the
> aforementioned category of mach3 users :P
>
> On 16 September 2014 10:03, Justin Mitchell <
> justin at swansea.hackspace.org.uk> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 2014-09-16 at 09:39 +0100, Ceri Clatworthy wrote:
>>
>> > But I will try to order a USB to Printer port cable,
>>
>> They are of no use, they are designed only to talk to well behaved
>> devices using the defined protocols, you cant bit bang (waggle
>> individual lines) with any kind of speed or accuracy.
>>
>> An interesting alternative suggestion is that if the existing controller
>> board is of the really dumb type, with just step and direction inputs,
>> then it may be possible to use a standard arduino and firmware and wire
>> up the parallel connector as if it was a bunch of stepsticks.
>>
>> I just dont know enough about the mills hardware to speculate further
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
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