Vexta serial based stepper controller - possible?

Hello, all;


I just bought a couple of Vexta 5 axis stepper packages from a local surplus place. They're pretty nice 700 oz-in steppers that came with (each) a UDK5128NA driver that has some nice features and accepts step/direction input, and an SC8800 controller that functions as a pulse generator and is also programmable, has limit switch inputs, general purpose I/Os and some other stuff.

The three parts are designed to connect together.. the controller generates pulses that the driver uses to move the stepper.

I know I can just run the step/dir inputs on the driver off of a parallel port under EMC2 and skip the controller. But, the controller is not limited in pulse rate and has all those nice extra I/O lines and features.

The thing is, to make it work I have to have a program that controls my lathe via serial port commands. I've seen other people comment on this here and there, but no one seems to have done much with this. I looked and neither EMC2 or Mach lets me do this (although with Mach it's more that I don't have the source code).

I have full documentation for the serial protocol and the programming language for the controller, so I could in theory write code to control it from a PC... but I don't want to write a full G-code interpreter that issues code to this controller. All I want is a control program that knows how to run an external stepper controller.

Does anyone know of a machine control program that outputs serial commands to position a stepper? It's not necessary to issue step/direction pulses, rather you just tell it "go there" and it goes.

I know that hardware like the smoothstepper exists for mach, and I know not everyone uses parallel port software stepping, so it must be possible somehow.

Thanks,
Erik