OMG! this looks brilliant

[BucksDad]

I’m in food and there’s a mixture of everything

 

[Spectric]

You will be talking about the old GPIB interface next, again once used by a lot of data loggers but long gone.

Serial comms come in many flavours, RS232 which was very common is limited to around 50 ft in the right enviroment, RS485 is a differential version which can be pushed to greater distances but why when you have the choice of ethernet or CAN bus. If you look at how far microcontrollers have progressed and their speeds it is just amazing, the dsPIC from microchip can reach 140 Mhz and has CAN, USB, SPI, I2C and yes still UART's (serial) .

The big advantage CAN offers is realtime control and a very good arbitration system to handle collisions on the bus which Ethernet does not so I would expect CAN will be around a while longer with ethernet moving large amounts of data.

Serial does go back in history a long way to the days of data terminals, just look at the pin outs for the connector and you get handshaking with things like DTR (Data terminal ready) but serial does have a massive advantage over USB when it comes to security. With serial you need to load the drivers into the machine for the device so admin rights etc etc, with USB it is another game because the USB device states what it is and has a say in the drivers loaded so it can tell porkies and load something you are not aware of.

 

[Spectric]

So back on subject, CNC machines great for production and getting high volume output but as we know everything starts somewhere to end up somewhere else. We used to use handtools to do the job a modern router or spindle can do and drill holes using manual labour so a little bit of CNC on our home routers might look like nothing much but jump forward twenty odd years. Now you have some android assistant at your command and just yell instructions at it and it goes off and makes what you want in your old workshop making you obsolete and with nothing to do. It then determines that this method is inefficient and gets rid of your old workshop because it has built you a great 3D printer instead which makes what you want, just not in a material of your choice. Next you find it has made a box having been reading about human burial traditions and has decided you are inefficient and need to be burried where your old workshop used to be.

 

[Crazy Dave]

That machine does everything for you but you still need to know what you're doing and that's my problem.

 

[niall Y]

In the immortal words of Reginald Perrin's boss - " I didn't get where I am today by knowing what I was doing"