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0 pointsanalog3110mo ago0 comments

Wow that takes me back. My graduate physics experiment ran on two MS-DOS computers with Turbo Pascal programs exercising the parallel ports. Each machine had a grotesque board that I made, with multiple ADC and DAC channels. I finished in 1993. By that time, of course, everything was obsolete, but I wasn't going to delay my project by upgrading.

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throwup23810mo ago

Obsolete is good! Hobbyists running mini CNCs and converting old manual Bridgeports exploited the obsoleteness well into the 2010s by buying up really cheap old machines to run Windows XP with MachCNC, which could drive the CNC via parallel port (with a proper expansion board, which used to be the expensive part).

It wasn't until the microcontrollers got powerful enough and Stratasys FDM patents expired that open source Klipper/Marlin firmware from the 3d printer community replaced MachCNC.

analog31OP10mo ago

Indeed, PC interfacing was what got me into microcontrollers. I had already mastered microprocessor interfacing and coding, but on desktop machines. Our lab got a Mac, and the only reasonable interface port was serial. So it made sense to put a MCU on the other end of that serial port, to continue my explorations. I still had to program the MCU with my MS-DOS machine, using a device programmer that I hacked together -- using the parallel port, and a freeware 8051 assembler.

Today, that MCU is a Teensy.

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0 pointsanalog3110mo ago0 comments

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throwup23810mo ago

It wasn't until the microcontrollers got powerful enough and Stratasys FDM patents expired that open source Klipper/Marlin firmware from the 3d printer community replaced MachCNC.

analog31OP10mo ago

Today, that MCU is a Teensy.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse