[berin]

Ok, this is just a starter thread. I'll add more to it tomarrow or the day after when I get a chance.
But to give a quick summery of what I'm going ot post in this. I have a bunch of info on building SERIAL to cnc controll open source. But I have YET to find any thing which is serial to step/dir with other tipical controll logic like relays and limet switches. I'll also be posting some example design's and hex/asm code which does this. But every thing out there is based on driving straight PHASE controll.
I'm looking for a setup which takes one of these open source setup's, and rewrite the code to basicly swap the control form from phase to step/dir. And every thing else basicly would stay the same.
A setup like this which is already 98% done would be great for driving controllers which just require step/dir. I can give you a great example, many people are using the expensive GECO drive controllers. But they require being hooked to the parallel port or some CUSTOM controll setup. Wouldnt it be nice to just wire it to a serial driven pic chip. That way we could get much greater use out of windows software. Where the parallel port fail's us every time in a manner and sence of max preformance of are hardware during windows software operation.

this serial to pic-step/dir would be a great addition to the cnczone open source as well.

basicly this is the way it works.

comport-max232-pic chip ? 16f877/18f452 <- interchangable, few relays, limet switches +/- ends because there are plenty of I/O's to go around. A few resistors/transistors diodes and thats it all done. HECK i found one setup which uses a max232 chip and three 12c509's. each 12c509 was attached to the same serial line. Then all you had to do was send an address header which one of the chips would pick up on. Followed by the movment command, but the one design like that that I found AGAIN outputed straight phase controll no step/dir.