I guess you are using the term "breakout board" to mean "external motor driver", so you are
NOT using the VAL system controller.
I am aware that I could purchase
6 of the Gecko drives which read quadrature sensors and drive them via the parallel port. An alternate option is to purchase a PCI 32 I/O board such as
32-bit Multi I/O PCI Express Controller Card PIOP9865-1P - DinoDirect.com for example. (I have seen these cards range from $20 to $500 ) I think the one I used for my CNC milling machine was $50 at the time, it gave me
64 programmable I/O bits that I set up as
32 Inputs and
32 outputs.
By doing that, I had enough inputs for other things like additional limit switches, start and stop lines for coolant, vacuum, etc.
I was wondering if someone had come up with a way to operate the PUMA via the
serial port... because the 6 Gecko Drives are $121 each, so that's
$726.00 USD total that would be needed to interface the unit in addition to the I/O cards.
Not having an extra $800 laying around... looks like I'll be doing manual control for a bit.
I would like to know how to get the 3D simulator up and running so that I can at least play with that on screen. RE:
Puma 560 3D model
Thanks,
Jerry