USB instead of parallel ?

[wolfdagon]

This is my first post. I have been looking at the forums for a few days now and am absorbing some knowledge about home built CNC machines. This is a great site. I keep seeing references to controlling them using the parallel port on a computer. If I do end up building one I will probably use my laptop to control it. However, my laptop does not have a parallel port (or if it does it is extremely well hidden). It has USB ports, an Expansion Port 2 (not sure what that is for), a port for an ethernet cable, a s-video port, and a VGA port. Is it possible to use one of the USB ports instead of a parallel port.

I will probably end up doing a very small dremel based system. I know that many of you say that the dremel is not good enough, but I just want to see if I can do it using the least amount of money possible (I already have the dremel). If I end up building a bigger system then I would probably try to get an older pc to dedicate to cotrolling it. But for now I would rather use my laptop if possible.

[WayneHill]

Hi wolfdagon,

Welcome to the group.

There are a couple of places that I know of for using USB with CNC controls.

One is Deskcam

http://www.imsrv.com/

and the other is a stepper driver board utility at.

http://www.ar.com.au/~softmark/page44.html

There is no current CNC control software that supports this USB board at this time.

The parallel port is going the way of the dodo bird. There will be other methods of controlling CNC's through the USB that currently exist or will be invented.

There are large number of PC's around with parallel ports that can be gotten for a song. It might be better to stay with "old technology" for a while and use battle proven software >> Mach 3.

Good Luck,

Wayne

[NC Cams]

You may want to think twice about using a laptop.

The power conservation logic can shut down the PC at very inopotune times. NOT GOOD.

Laptops with parallel ports sometimes are low power variants. These have raised all sorts of problems in communicating with things other than printers.

Basically, the USB controlling of CNC has pro's and con's that have been discussed on numerous prior threads.

The CNC ZOne search engine is your friend and if/when used properly, will guide you to answers to questions about USB and CNC that you haven't even thought of yet but have already been answered.

[ger21]

A Mach3 plugin is being written for the ncPod. http://ncpod.oemtech.com/

[wolfdagon]

Originally Posted by NC Cams The CNC ZOne search engine is your friend and if/when used properly, will guide you to answers to questions about USB and CNC that you haven't even thought of yet but have already been answered.

I agree. I have been using the search engine to browse the forums. However, when I did a search for usb (before posting my question) it returned no results.

Since it seems, that I will need to use a computer with a parallel port after all, are there any minimum system requirements I need to keep in mind? I think my cousin still has a 133 Mhz (upgraded from 66) Windows 98 machine with a 10MB hard drive. Can't remember how much RAM.