[jc286006]

what is a good cpu for doing cnc router work also if you have a 2.0 gig or faster processor can you run 2 machines at the same time off of 1 computer if you have 2 parallel ports? i have the hobby cnc drive board and stepper motors that i am going to use on my 1st machine and will most likely go with them on my 2nd one too.i am looking at the different cnc programs that are available and will most likely start with either mach or turbo cnc i havent decided yet. but my main question is can 1 computer run 2 machines at the same time if configured correctly
thanks for any info James

[Bloy2004]

I think you're talking about "multi-tasking". Some controllers may be able to be running simultaneously( Idon't know), But Mach2/3 takes over the lower levels of the computer and can only run one application of itself at a time. Now if you use 6 axes and have the g-code configured to run those axes properly to two machines with three motors each, you may be able to do it.....only guessing :idea:

[jwstolk]

I use a 160 MHz pentium to run my own stepping software. it can calculate the timing
for each step (for several motors) without any problems. (i.e: solve 2nd order equation
for each step, to figure out when the the next step will be, based on current speed and
acceleration) The only reason i need a pentium is that it contains a 64-bit clock, that
counts at 160 MHz, and can be directly accessed with a single assembly instruction.
(also no timer runover problems, as long as the milling takes less than 400 years :-)

I run under dos, with all interrupts disabled (even keyboard!), and may code generator
builds in a full motor stop every 100 moves, so i can load the next batch of moves from
disk into memory without any problems.

but other stepping software may be less efficient. :-)

(i will publish my software soon. (it's small and written in 16-bit pascal, with some
32-bit assembly instructions thrown in.)

jaap.

[ESjaavik]

@James: The short answer is no, you cannot.

A modern PC could do it given the right software, but not with Mach1/2/3, TurboCNC or any of the other standard programs. So you would have to write it yourself. And if you could do that, you would not have asked.

And even with a huge budget and a staff of programmers it would be madness to do it unless those two machines had a very tight dependency on each other. Today even not in that case, since inter-machine data exchange have become very fast and realtime. Programmers are expensive, hardware is cheap.

[pmurray]

When it comes to performance on a PC, I find that what Intel and AMD give, Microsoft quickly takes away.

plm

[CJL5585]

When it comes to performance on a PC, I find that what Intel and AMD give, Microsoft quickly takes away.

plm

AMEN!

Jerry