Monolithic control for drives is a tempting idea, I would want one too. Some time ago I was planning to make drives that could share single RS-232 line for position controlling and feedback. It would be very cheap and might perform well. PC serial ports have FIFO buffers that could produce very steady command timing even on non-RT system.
However, the real bottlenecks of machine accuracy or performance typically lie in some other place than PC<->drive communication. |