Surface plate height gauge adapter for dial indicator holding

[tonyfoale]

Tony:
I need to research the Ethernet interface to Mach3, but the controllers all seem to want the printer port, I need to look further.

Steve,
I bought a Bridgeport mill which had been fitted from new with an Anilam control and driver system. Which was definitely old tech when I got it. It worked OK but the RS232 port and proprietry mini-tape recorder/reader refused all efforts at communication, which meant that I had to punch in the programme each time I wanted to use it. This got tiring real quick so I started to look around for a replacement controller which could be PC driven. I had perfectly good servos, motor drivers and glass slides which I wanted to keep. I also had duplicates of all that. Whilst i found stacks of systems out there they all seemed to be aimed at or included stepper motors and rotary encoders. Apart from the expense of replacing everything I had no intention of downgrading from the servos and linear slides. Finding a suitable controller was not easy but I ended up going for a Galil card with 4 axis. More costly than I was planning but top quality stuff and worked with Mach3 with a plug-in and ethernet. It also did the processing on the card rather than in the PC. Mach3 basically said "I want to here" and the Galil card worked out how to. the PI in PID was done on the card and the D was done within the original drivers. So it was a closed loop system with the card closing the loop with Mach3 working open loop just sending demands. On a Windows OS with all its quirks this is probably the best way to do it. Although I don't do Linux I would have gone to Linux CNC except that it was not compatible with the Galil. I have recently learnt that Galil now have some Linux support so I may revisit it.
All this is a long way of saying how I used ethernet with Mach3.

I never liked the syntax of "C", but I did have to do collateral work on designs of others, amazingly, it never stayed in my head, unlike BASIC, FORTRAN, PL1, PASCAL and any number of Assembly mnemonics. But I'm believing the only low cost kits I see are Arduino based development. I also see many frustrated coders on blog sites trying to figure out where they went wrong, especially with quad encoder, as they are servicing this with interrupt vs having a peripheral counter.

i have never liked C syntax either. I started with Fortran IV, hand written fixed format coding sheets and punched cards. I avoided BASIC where possible, now I mostly use Delphi, which is object Pascal for Windows. I agree that a peripheral counter is preferable but as long as the frequency is not too high, interrupts do the job. A side effect of the uptake of the Arduino and other systems which provide easy ways to use micros is that a large proportion of users do not have much in the way of coding or other technical skills so you get a lot of frustrated coders as you observe. It is not an indication that it is difficult, in fact it is the reverse.

Looking at your casting of a 4 stroke intake, exhaust port, cylinder head geometry, and measuring flow, and computing flow rate improvement is a SERIOUS petro head hobby. I didn't see from your text, what DAS you had to do this. But clearly you are "in deep" with IP of engine design. Looks like you are working with a 'hemi' configuration.

I mostly use a LabJack for collecting data. The engines that get most of my attention are Aermacchi 4 strokes (HD sprints in American). In the early 1970s I raced them and when I started classic racing in my dotage I decided to race a replica of what I used to use.

I didn't understand the shear tool, as it looks more like it's burnishing the work vs scraping. I'm missing something.

The best I can offer by way of explanation, is to imagine the shear tool being dragged across a non-rotating work piece, I think that will show a shaping action. Shear tool is not my term and I don't like it because it causes confusion, but it is the accepted term for that type of tool.