RE: Galil Motor Controllers

["Redman, Russell" <Russell.Redman@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca>]

Yes, but...

I quite like the Galil motor controllers because they are extremely versatile and quite reliable.  

The built-in versions of operations like homing were not acceptable for our purposes, so we have written a large and extremely application-specific program that runs in the Galil and impliments three basic operations
1) home
2) slew to position with backlash correction
3) move slowly to position without backlash correction
These operations are controlled for each axis (X, Y, Z or W) by setting a command variable (XCMD, YCMD, ZCMD or WCMD) and rading back a custom status word (XSTATUS, YSTATUS, ZSTATUS, WSTATUS).  The EPICS code interfaces to the program in the Galil through these command variables and status values, not directly to the native Galil commands.  

We also had to deal with a few other oddities.  For example, the serial ports are on a networked terminal server.  The terminal server buffers packets and there is no way to set the buffering time to zero.  This adds a major communications delay that prevents us from managing each axis independently.  Also, there are mechanical linages that require all three axes on one of our Galils to home simultaneously.  

Our solution works for us, but has been customized to fit our application very precisely.  I am not sure it would generalize to other applications without putting in at least as much work to modify it as we did to develop it.  If you are still interested after all this discouragement, I could package up the relevant files for you, but this is not something I would contemplate supporting for the community.

Cheers,
Dr. Russell O. Redman 
Tel: (250) 363-6917 | Fax: (250) 363-0045 
<mailto:Russell.Redman@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca> 
National Research Council Canada | Conseil national de recherches Canada 
5071 West Saanich Road           | 5071 West Saanich Road 
Victoria, B. C. V9E 2E7          | Victoria, C.-B. V9E 2E7 
Government of Canada             | Gouvernement du Canada
--  
-----Original Message-----
From: Andreas Isenegger [mailto:andreas.isenegger@psi.ch] 
Sent: Monday, May 30, 2005 6:45 AM
To: tech-talk@aps.anl.gov
Subject: Galil Motor Controllers


Hi all,

Did anyone implement support for any type of these controllers?

Regards,
Andreas