Fighting with computers

As usual, even best-laid plans face hardship, so now I can wireless upload g-code files to the USB memory connected to a DDCSV1.1 CNC controller. But, once I factor in not to upload a code line before I have got the remote echo of it, things get really slow. Like ten minutes per megabyte. Yes, I wanted it to be wireless. I could accept a not so fast upload speed, but 13 Kbps is not ok as we handle files in the 1-10 MByte range usually. A few seconds is ok, but half an hour or more is not. So I came up with yet another approach that would recycle some old-tech that I discarded years ago: There was a USB dongle that would accept an SD card and it would work as a USB pen driver but with a twist: the unit did also have wifi connectivity. So the users could access the content of the SD card wirelessly as a network disk. That was cool and made totally unnecessary (apparently) my previous work but, there was a catch: The device would work either as a pen drive (as soon as you connect it ...

I explained a while ago how I set up a farm of CNC routers. At that time a combination of an Android tablet and an Arduino running Marlin was a good compromise for a DIY system. Over the years, one thing that was demanded was to have controllers that are a single machine (as the USB cable from the tablet to the Arduino creates problems at times due to machine's vibration). Several options are available in the marketplace of small and affordable CNC controllers that require no computer and can run jobs off a USB pen drive. No computer or tablet required. One of such a system, running Linux, with a nice display and keyboard, is the Digital Dreams units DDCSV1.1 and above. I bought one unit a couple of years ago but it was never used, but now I am giving it a try on a test machine, where we want to reach 5000 mm/s^2 accelerations and speeds above 30 meters per minute and the fact that unit could create step pulses at a 500kHz rate really caught my attention. It can do that n...