Sunday, August 14, 2005
Real-work test
I can proudly say that gcode has been tested on real hardware with real stepper motors and a pencil instead of a real wire EDM process. Steppers are running, the form and trajectory speed looks fine, no one micron escapes on fast moves.
Now I'm working on some modifications that include a re-worked real-time kernel patch that uses local APIC and its timer, so I suspect to reduce interrupt latency about 10 more times: it is 50 microseconds at the moment and I read a report about analogous work done by Bernhard Kuhn and he claimed 5 microseconds latency. That looks likely as in such case there are no system bus and PCI transactions.
I'm also going to rearchitect the lowest-level gcode module (a kernel module) to make it more flexible, so that other hardware configurations could be easily supported as well. Today this turns out to be a priority because it turns out that it is not so easy to successfully pop up with a wire EDM CNC software today :) I need a universal software machine controller to keep interest in the project, so I'm thinking hard on how it should be implemented.
Now I'm working on some modifications that include a re-worked real-time kernel patch that uses local APIC and its timer, so I suspect to reduce interrupt latency about 10 more times: it is 50 microseconds at the moment and I read a report about analogous work done by Bernhard Kuhn and he claimed 5 microseconds latency. That looks likely as in such case there are no system bus and PCI transactions.
I'm also going to rearchitect the lowest-level gcode module (a kernel module) to make it more flexible, so that other hardware configurations could be easily supported as well. Today this turns out to be a priority because it turns out that it is not so easy to successfully pop up with a wire EDM CNC software today :) I need a universal software machine controller to keep interest in the project, so I'm thinking hard on how it should be implemented.
# posted by erdizz @ 12:25 PM 
