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Well I hope I didn’t say “it just works”, because it took some work, but we did get this running for a customer that was building a 5 axis machine.
http://www.pocketnc.com/We connected 2 v7’s together using RS-485 and ran one (the master) as XYZ and relayed gcode down to the other for the rotary axes. It worked, but the few milliseconds of latency between the master and slave was enough to mess up the fine coordinated motion required for 5 axis machining.
So our solution (and what the PocketNC uses now) is a true 5 axis board based on the ARM code base we’ve been working on the the last 12 months. The code base is available in experimental for under the synthetos G2 github. It will compile for our ARM proto boards (example): http://www.flickr.com/photos/rileyporter/12083763146/
…or to run native on an Arduino Due. You provide all motor electronics.
We are aiming to have the ARM version out this spring (soon!)
Sorry for the late response.
I think Kinen can get you there, but you may need some sort of coordinator for the other items. One main aspect to consider is what is the biggest coordinated domain you need? Is 5 axes enough? Do you need more that that in tight coordination? The other aspect is how many independent motion domains do you need? – i.e. motors or motor groups that do not need to be in lock-step. For example, can manage uncertainty / latency of 10’s of milliseconds.
(This was the problem with our early experiments with PocketNC – we put 2 TinyG’s together to make 6 controlled axes, but the lag between the XYZ controller and the ABC controller was too great, and the tool head ultimately did not track well. But if XYZ motion were independent of ABC motion it would have worked OK).
Right now the v9 in development can handle 5 axes – 6 with extension of coordinated motion. The other “onesy-twosy” axes can be handled with independent motion sub-systems. Then you are left with the issue of integrating these.
Kinen is based on the JSON work we have done, and we are working towards control of multiple motion / sensor domains by routing JSON objects based on inspection of the parent tag (if this makes any sense). See here:
https://github.com/Kinen/Kinen/wiki/Kinen-RESTful-Hardware-Conventions#wiki-advanced-conventionsThis way you can integrate larger systems consisting of independent sub-systems. It makes Kinen scalable to a reasonably large system consisting of loosely coupled motion / sensor domains.
If you are interested in moving this forward we should talk further. Otherwise, just watch this space. (No promises on timing!)
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