Originally Posted by NC Cams Food for thought: Bridgeport ran a full CNC 4 axis machine with their own PLC board and a 133mhz or SLOWER DOS machine in the mid 90's. |
I have the same problem. The wasting of cycles and memory is painful. The other thing that is painful is that as we get faster and faster processors, the I/O speed that's available to things like CNC doesn't get any faster. Just doesn't seem right.
Actually, I'm nearly positive that the big companies making almost anything have windows based controllers. Labview is very popular, and you can get a realtime version of Windows.
The cool thing about Linux is that you can program like you program for DOS. Not that hard. And it gives you the modern memory and disk capacity as well as a very robust network. Windows works in a lab environment, but I wouldn't trust it for anything that is potentially dangerous. I cringe thinking about Mach controlling a large machine. My experience with doing things like that is very bad. Of course, step and direction is self limiting, so if Bill Gates decides to take over your computer and doesn't give the CNC any cycles, nothing happens but a small glich.
But if I need to program a graphical interface, I program in Windows. Too much investment in learning how to do that.