The Inner Workings Of A Coders Brain
Posts tagged Controller
Getting Back Into Parker 6K4 / 6K6 Controller Programming Again
04 years
Its been a long time since I did any work on the Parker Controllers, but I have been having the itch again for quite a while to do some more work on it. There were many things I was doing with the controller that could have been optimized, or improved – such as better feature detection and improved latency. I also never really got around to adding encoder support for any of my previous projects with the controller.
I recently got a Parker 6K6 controller from eBay to work with. They are available for less than 50 dollars nowadays. Its been a lot of fun writing new code to talk back and forth with the controller in a proper, organized way. I have made a new basic communication library that allows easy connection and Send/Receive capability and can be shared across various C++ projects, so if I want to make something new I can just import that code and get going. Adding an interface with wxWidgets 3.xx is fairly straight forward and saves a lot of time. A long time ago I had used an old Parker controller (It wasn’t a 6K4, it was a much older model that used an ISA connection card) to make an experimental CNC routing table for a saw. It was pretty basic, it just about worked but wasn’t very good.
My son is also going to tech school and has been expressing an interest in learning how to work with CNC machines a little more in-depth than just loading a model and pressing the Start button, so I think if I can teach him some of this from a purely technical level, it will help him understand better. I think that him helping to build the machine and understand the programming will be quite beneficial. G-Code in itself is quite a complex thing to learn, especially from an optimization stand point, so we will have to see how it goes.
As I make progress in code, I will make some updates here. If you are interested in this sort of thing or have any questions, let me know in the comments below. Not sure anyone even uses this controller anymore!
Prototyping New CNC FlexIO Program
213 years
I have been working on a new version of my FlexIO program for quite some time new, which has a lot of new features in it including use of wXwidgets for the GUI interface, better accuracy, and even more tools & control for the operator using it. This week I have finally began connecting stepper motors to it, and doing some real motor experiments.
There have been other significant improvements to the program as well, especially on the controller side. It is still using the Parker 6K4/ZETA4 Combo, only now with the new code the communication between the hardware and the controller is much more effective. It also does not need such a high end PC to run, as now there is no DirectX requirements, there doesn’t need to be any high refresh rates. This was a problem with the MicroATX computer used on Joshua, and a problem of the old program anyways. We all do crazy things when we have very little time to complete a project 🙂
Now that the new program is going through the final paces of it’s hardware testing, I hope to have this finished and out of the way within the next couple of weeks depending on how many free nights I get to work on it. I have a lot of other projects building up that I need to work on! Click on any image to see an enlarged version.
In the above picture: Hardware setup from the original FlexIO Classic program. On the left are 3 ZETA83-135-MO Parker stepper motors, each connected to a ZETA4 controller box (the 3 stacked units to the right of the motors). These are then connected to the Parker 6K4 controller box (the large box to the right of the ZETA4 units, with 4 red LED’s on the top) which controls the motor’s movement. The 6K4 is then connected to the PC via an RS-232 connection, which receives instructions from FlexIO. During the development process, laying the motors out flat like this is a good way to test the motor communication & the programs ability to switch between motors and steps accurately and smoothly, without damaging any real hardware in the event that a problem might occur.
Screenshot of the current beta program interface for setting up the cable being processed:
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