Hello-

as the title states, I'm in need of some help understanding the capabilities of emc2. I used emc2 to control a stepper based harbor freight mill that I put together which used the parallel port as the controller<-->driver interface. It worked great, and the stepper control through the parallel port was very simple.

I now have a much bigger mill, a Lagun 2cnc with an anilam controller and wanted to look into how difficult a controller re-fit would be.

My question is as follows- regarding the use of servos with emc2, what inputs and outputs does the emc2 software expect to be used?

I see a lot of people mentioning systems like Mesa electronics or the fpga based pluto board for hardware interfaces between emc2 and the servo drivers, but what exactly are these systems doing? does it vary driver to driver?

Regarding the motors and drivers already on the machine, I'm not even sure of what type of input they take- it seems to be 0-5v analog signals correlated with the rpms- What interfaces would be used to give emc2 the ability to output analog values (or what interface can I expect to carry digital info to a D/A device) ?

what hardware is allowing for the "HAL oscope" on this page:
http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emc...rvo_Amplifiers ??

I'm seeing the hardware abstraction layer subject come up qhuite a lot but im falling short of understanding its role in the whole system's process... the wiki page doesnt seem to cover all that much of its capabilities...

someone mind simplifying how HAL is applied for me?
maybe hint at how it might help me get bytes out for analog conversion or something?

thanks for any help!

-pat