Connecting Parallel board to USB

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TKL
Printmaster!
Posts: 41
Joined: Sat Apr 14, 2012 6:07 pm
Location: Denmark

Connecting Parallel board to USB

Post by TKL »

Have anyone tried using a USB to LPT cable to connect the parallel board to the USB port? It has to be one with a driver for Linux so I can use it with CNC2.
jcugnoni
Plasticator
Posts: 18
Joined: Sat May 19, 2012 5:11 am

Re: Connecting Parallel board to USB

Post by jcugnoni »

Hi,

Actually, even with an adapter and a Linux driver, it will fail in the end because of the random latency that such device introduces. You need to understand that in the present case, the parallel port is not used as a data bus but is a programmable pulse generator. For the cnc / printer to work, all pulses must be timed and synched accurately.
With usb, the synchronisation and required time accuracy is just impossible to reach. For Linuxcnc to work, you need a good old parallel port soldered on your motherboard or on a fast synchronous bus like PCI.
drkow
Prints-a-lot
Posts: 29
Joined: Thu May 24, 2012 2:46 pm

Re: Connecting Parallel board to USB

Post by drkow »

The CNC scene has been using the $155 smoothstepper device to do this for a while: http://www.warp9td.com/

Some of them are finally starting to switch to the cheaper RAMPS setup though.
Gimbal
Printmaster!
Posts: 44
Joined: Tue May 28, 2013 10:25 am

Re: Connecting Parallel board to USB

Post by Gimbal »

I'm using UC100 usb to paralell for my CNC3020 and it works great, so you can run Mach3 on a laptop ;-)
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