Pathpilot Arduino Integration - Does Anybody Have any Pointers?

[TheBigLebowski]

For those who have done it, can you share information on how you were able to get Pathpilot (2.0 or greater) to communicate with an arduino board via serial?

I am currently using the Tormach USB I/O and counting pulses with the arduino to send info from Pathpilot. I have quickly concluded that though this works, it compounds the possibility for errors. I would like to eliminate the USB I/O and send information (and get feedback) directly to and from the arduino.

Any Info you can share would be greatly appreciated.

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[jwatte]

What, specifically, do you want to communicate? The G code? The pulses?

The Arduino can plug straight into the PathPilot controller computer -- it's just a standard Linux PC. You can talk to it using whatever serial port it comes up as; typically /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyACM0.
However, you'll obviously need to change some code in the PathPilot software itself to actually write data to the Arduino.

If you want the actual stepper pulses to go to the Arduino, there's no easy way to do that, because the pulses are generated by the FPGA on the add-in board in the PC, not on the PC processor itself.
The only way to read those pulses is to electrically hook up to the output of the DB-25 connector.

[sansbury]

A little late to the party here, but I documented a LinuxCNC-Arduino integration a while back. This won’t give you everything but hopefully it gets you a little closer. I just got a PathPilot controller today and am planning to port my pendant to it.

https://ckcnc.wordpress.com/basic-arduino-emc-howto/