Thanks for all the advice.
Like I said in my original post, no one in our shop has ever run a CNC machine, and many of the guys who will be operating it have never touched a computer. That's the reason I don't want to just set up an old PC to run this thing. It needs to be idiot proof or I will have a miserable next six months.
I've been working with the PIC 18F452 which runs at 40 Mhz. Even with the timer dividing factor, the timers will operate at 10 Mhz. That should be more than fast enough to pulse the geckos, even at 1/8th microstepping. My leadscrews are 5 tpi ball screws so 600 rpm would be 3000 ipm, that's much faster than I'm going to be going.
I have thrown out the idea of messing with circular interpolation, and have broken down any curves into simple line segments. |