On Monday, December 17, 2012 6:57:04 AM UTC-6, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message

...

On 2012-12-16, Jim Wilkins wrote:

...

Now, the $600.00 item looks like it is designed to talk to a

Fadal already, so it has done all the hard work for you.



Note that the Calmotion comes with a *tiny* (2 GB) USB drive,

which suggest that it may not be very useful with much larger ones,

or

anything larger than a floppy drive. Depends on what the Fadal

knows

how to handle.





I posted general computer information since I don't have a Fadal, or

any other automated machine tool, not even a DRO.



AFAICT USB floppy boot emulation may be limited to 2.88 MB, double

density. I bought a handful of 128MB thumb drives real cheap for

bootable DOS and low-level test programs that originally were on

floppy. Once DOS is up they show the full size.



DOS boots and runs amazingly fast on a relatively modern CPU. I just

booted the flash drive on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo laptop that I'm fixing

up for someone who is losing their job. Gotta get a later version of

DOS-based Dell Diagnostics though, the Pentium M version on the flash

drive won't run on it.

jsw

What about a $50 used laptop computer running TERMINAL (An old windows program)?
The programs are all in ordinary ASCII format, you just need to dump them out to the serial port to the CNC control.
The TERMINAL program handles that nearly perfectly.