microsecond timer

Am digging and digging through posts on timers. But have yet to find what I am looking for. I need a microsecond timer to utilize with the firefly plugin. Am reading digital pin states. When you are working with motors you are looking at signal rates that get down in the microseconds. Looking for either a timer that fits the bill or other suggestions as to how to implement. Overall goal is linking real world to cad simulations of mechanisms as close to real time as we can get.

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 14, 2014 at 3:50pm

Grasshopper runs as a windowed application within a multitasking OS and as such there's no way to guarantee any sort of timing accuracy. Windows may simply put GH on hold for as long as it pleases. In addition to that, you certainly won't be able to fire off new solutions quicker than they can be solved. Even the simplest of Grasshopper files won't solve quicker than a few milliseconds, so the notion that you can achieve microsecond accuracy through GH is not realistic.

Custom code that runs in a separate high-priority thread will perform better, but even then there's no guarantee Windows will give you the processor cycles needed to act in time.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Permalink Reply by Matthew Gilbride on June 14, 2014 at 4:17pm

Thanks for the feedback!

That's interesting. I am looking over the stepper motor components of the Firefly plugin and see that they theoretically are sending out pulses to control stepper motors. Maybe my understanding of the timing of these pulses is flawed. But am under the impression that they run in the 5 to 50 microsecond frequency?

The biggest step pulse width I can currently set on the firmware is 232 microseconds.

Also, don't networking components read pulses within this frequency range?

What I really want to do is just read in a constant stream of 1's and 0's and count them! Maybe I am going about it all wrong.

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