Dell 1520 laptop with a parallel Express card
Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2014 6:39 pm
Well, I've had a fun experience this weekend.
The computer I had been using for my machine was an old P4 without HT all in one PC. Worked a treat on 8.04 but was quite buggy in 10.04.
I've got a newer Dell 1520 laptop which was pretty much redundant as the battery doesn't really hold a charge and it's just to big and cumbersome for a laptop when I've got something much smaller and newer to use.
I've been wanting to get rid of the all in one PC for a while because it's ugly and considering it's in my 'desk' area I just don't like the look of it. Also, it's a shame to have a reasonable Laptop sitting there going to waste that could actually be used to backup DVD's and be used for other light processing tasks. With that in mind, I set about setting up a dual boot ubuntu 10.04 on the laptop AGES ago but never actually tested it out on my machine due to not having a parallel port, massive clincher there!
It's got good timing, about 16,000ns which is plenty good enough for the step rate I'm after. I bit the bullet last week and invested in an £18 expresscard to parallel adapter and turned up saturday. To my sheer surprise, it installed flawlessly on ubuntu, gave me a hardware hex address and integrated with LinuxCNC flawlessly and am currently cutting the first circuit board on this new piece of hardware.
Just for those who might be interested, my old machine is now up for sale.
The computer I had been using for my machine was an old P4 without HT all in one PC. Worked a treat on 8.04 but was quite buggy in 10.04.
I've got a newer Dell 1520 laptop which was pretty much redundant as the battery doesn't really hold a charge and it's just to big and cumbersome for a laptop when I've got something much smaller and newer to use.
I've been wanting to get rid of the all in one PC for a while because it's ugly and considering it's in my 'desk' area I just don't like the look of it. Also, it's a shame to have a reasonable Laptop sitting there going to waste that could actually be used to backup DVD's and be used for other light processing tasks. With that in mind, I set about setting up a dual boot ubuntu 10.04 on the laptop AGES ago but never actually tested it out on my machine due to not having a parallel port, massive clincher there!
It's got good timing, about 16,000ns which is plenty good enough for the step rate I'm after. I bit the bullet last week and invested in an £18 expresscard to parallel adapter and turned up saturday. To my sheer surprise, it installed flawlessly on ubuntu, gave me a hardware hex address and integrated with LinuxCNC flawlessly and am currently cutting the first circuit board on this new piece of hardware.
Just for those who might be interested, my old machine is now up for sale.