Third-party driver/motor control

[DCR]

I have purchased a Zeta4 stepper motor and driver from Compumotor, and I have an old LE stepper motor and driver from the same company. My first question is: are there any PCI controller cards (indexers) that can easily run both drivers, without purchasing from Compumotor? I can easily find the codes I'll need to write to the drives, but I need some way to access both through serial ports. My other question is: are there any VI libraries that come with the card or that I can obtain that will work with LabVIEW 6.1 in order to run these and a PCI-GPIB for multi-step experimentation? I would prefer to have all of my equipment being run by LabVIEW if possible. Thanks.

[Dustin_W]

What you need to look at is the type of control signals you would need to send to the drivers/ motors. NI has motion control cards that are tightly integrated with LabVIEW that will control the motion, but the drive needs to be able to take a step and direction input, or a clockwise/counter clockwise pulse. The PCI cards are 7334 for stepper only, or 7344 for both stepper and servo. If the drives can only be accessed through serial ports, then you'll have to use Compumotor's commands to actually control them.

[DCR]

Well, it actually is a parallel port, it does take step and direction, and also cw/ccw pulse, and I can obtain the command lines. As far as I know this is everything I need. Are there any libraries available?

[algames]

Our standard NI-Motion 6.0 driver and one of the 73xx series controllers can be used with the Zeta drives by interfacing them through the UMI 7764. The driver is free and automatically installs all of the libraries needed to program your motion control application using either LabVIEW or C/C++.