Hi Guys,
I'm currently working on a airbrush robot, see http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=93184 for more details.
At the moment, I'm trying to work out how to properly control the machine with EMC2. I've got the X/Y movement all figured out and working properly and I'm now trying to get my head around controlling my toolhead (the airbrush). I've got it set up so that a servo motor pushes down on the airbrush button to turn the airflow on an off. The servo is controlled by an Arduino board that sets it to a certain position when it gets a high or low signal on one of its digital inputs. I'm thinking this should be a pretty basic thing to figure out but I'm not quite sure about how to deal with this in gcode creation and EMC control.
I'm using the inkscape extension to generate gcode from vector paths and I'm thinking I should modify the script or write something to modify the gcode to my wishes. I'm thinking I could somehow replace any G00/G01 Z## commands with a command(maybe M7/M9 for "mist") that will set one of the pins on my parallel port high/low, that should do the trick.
I'm wondering if this makes any sense to you guys and maybe of you have some ideas on how to implement this or any other input, that would be highly appreciated.