A few years ago I looked at a shopbot to microcontroller interface using the shopbot discretes. I ran some tests using my PRT Alpha control box and discovered that I could change output discretes at 8,000 times per second. Including overhead, it looked like 2K bits per second were possible from the shopbot to the microcontroller. Might be able to get 1K bits per second in the reverse direction.

The results were too slow to move much data but fast enough to send commands and such. I wanted to move large amounts of data from the microcontroller to the shopbot so I dropped the effort.

Paul Z