Originally Posted by
JayneV
Ahhhh, that makes sense. I never really liked the idea of the steps being controlled by a parallel port. It seemed like obsolete technology. It seems logical to have a dedicated piece of hardware to control the motors reliably. An average personal computer, whether, Windows, Linux, Mac, is a multifunctional device designed to do many different tasks, it's not really intended to accurately control time critical external hardware, although it can be done.
I haven't done much research on the various electronic components yet. Is the gcode streamed to the motion controller from the PC in real time or is the entire code sent to the MC at once and then the motion controller runs independently of the computer? I'm thinking about my 3D printer, where the gcode is generated in slicing software and saved to an SD card and then the card is plugged into the printer to execute the code.