Controlling LPT ports, Com ports, Stepper motor controllers

[metron9]

I am working on a project to make an XY table controlled with a PC using stepper motors. I have found quite a bit of information on the subject and just found telepathy for RS232 communication through Clipper on this forum.

One choice I have is a turnkey system that has C and other library files. I think I can call the functions in a C library but I am not sure.

Another option is buying the motors and controllers and providing all of my own code to communicate thru the Com port. I have a serial to parallel port device and I am wondering if the combination of using Clipper/Telepathy to control an RS232 port and the external serial to parallel converter could work.

I guess what I am searching for here is anyone who has any experiance controlling stepper motors/ xy tables etc.. would comment on the direction you think I should go.

I do have Visual c/basic/foxpro, could use Quickbasic/Qbasic, but I would like to use Clipper as the only thing I need is a way to communicate to either the lpt ports directly or Rs232.

 

[TonHu]

Ah, advice requested ;-) I have some:

a) Look for a electro/mechanical set that can be driven from Windows using some DLL/OCX ready-made driver. Then switch your app to xHarbour (

http://www.xharbour.org

or

http://www.xharbour.com)

and use the built-in OLE features to control the steppers, or directly call DLL functions.
The type of physical connection for the steppers should best be USB or ethernet, as these interfaces are to be implemented/available/cheap for the near future. Don't opt-out bluetooth either.
b) If you still want to go with RS232 serial, get a warrant from some supplier that RS232 ports will be available for the next years, for some reasonable price :-(, as less and less PC's are equiped with these 'legacy' ports. On laptops they have been abandoned already!
c) Apart from switching to xHarbour for technical reasons, speed and available memory are other good reasons to still switch to a 32 bit compiler. xHarbour is fully OOP capable, and some GUI libs are available, most of them for Windows, but at least one is currently available for Linux (FWH; FiveWin Harbour), and freeware implementations are available (MiniGUI, HwGui). Parts of CA-Tools III and NanFor lib are also available with xHarbour, and SQLRDD and Apollo RDD are (commercially) available RDD's the can handle SQL databases with native xbase syntax. (Direct SQL statements is better for performance though, because of the nature of SQL queries).
d) Programming language is hardly of any matter, just use what you are most comfortable with, for the whole building process for this app. : Database, User-interface, Technical impementation, Programming skills all make a huge difference when selecting the right environment for the project.

Have fun coding!

HTH
TonHu