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

[Gerrit Niezen]

It seems a solution appeared on Hackaday the same day that you were discussing the problem:
http://hackaday.com/2014/09/16/usb-to-db25-adapter-uses-grbl-for-parallel-port-cnc-communication/

Guess what: It’s Arduino-based and runs GRBL.

On 16 Sep 2014, at 10:16, Justin Mitchell <justin at swansea.hackspace.org.uk> wrote:

> If you have a have any kind of wiring / pinout for the current parallel
> connector that would be a great help.
> 
> but it sounds like a perfectly reasonable goal to just wire that
> connector to an arduino board running the firmware i previously
> mentioned, which will make running it much easier.
> 
> On Tue, 2014-09-16 at 10:09 +0100, Graham Owens wrote:
>> 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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> 
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