Hardware Project

[khorster@saturn.superlink.net (Karl Horster)]

	I work in a machine shop, and as my boss was digging through some
old stuff, I came into the possesion of a stepper motor controller for the
Apple II.  Made by Centroid, Inc. (CNC controller manufacturers, still in
business) it was accessed through a parallel card supplied by them.  I
have the card, the driver board(which requires an external power supply)
and a manual.  The software has long since vanished, but since this was
made in the days before Brother Bill, the source code is in the manual.
It has a basic program that interfaces with the user, and a assembly
language program that interfaces with the parallel card, and then to the
driver board.  The board supports 4 stepper motors, with 8 limit switch
inputs.  These were mainly used for a CNC milling operation in which you
would move axes to mill parts.  I have not yet tried the board yet because
the stepper motors I have, have no specifications, hence I don't know how
to power them.  The manual has a circuit schematic for the driver board,
and a lot of helpful inside info.

	The company is still in business and I called on an unrelated
issue and asked a guy there about any Apple II stuff they might have had
laying around.  He said he didn't know of any, and they haven't don't
anything for the Apple in 15 years.  Stepper Motor technology is also on
the way out, being replace with digital drives as he called them.  Of
course all this stuff is copyrighted, but I'm really not sure they would
care....

	What this could mean:  Robotic control from your Apple II. (or for
that matter any computer, as long as you figure out the parallel card
signals)  You could build simple robots out of stepper motors, and use the
limit switch inputs for direction, guidence, etc.  Or god forbid you could
actually use it for CNC mill operations.

	Someone wanted a hardware project, and here's one.  I don't have a
lot of time to be fiddling with it, but I wouldn't mind collaborating with
someone on it.  There are a lot of possibilities with this and it wouldn't
be much to reproduce the board and possibly make some improvements....