On 2/7/2012 5:48 PM, Steve Blackmore wrote: >> However, fun though that might be, I doubt it would reach completion, >> >or gain any sort of market acceptance outside a very small subset of >> >LinuxCNC users, and almost certainly wouldn't expand outside our >> >project. > Agreed - May be interesting as an academic exercise, but has little > practical merit. > > Fanuc style or RS274 Gcode is pretty much universally understood, quite > a lot of minor variations, but the majority of code is easily > translatable from one controller type to another. It doesn't take much > effort or academic aptitude to grasp. I honestly can't see the point in > trying to reinvent the wheel? > > Steve Blackmore Steve:
This isn't a reply to you so much as it is a coda to the thread for which your message seems to be the most recent. I see that I last participated on the first of February. I was diagnosed with pneumonia the next day and have been out of it since. I recently fired up my email client and found over 400 emc-users messages waiting. Yikes. You folks have been busy bees. After reading all the messages in this thread and its companion "Do CAM instead?" thread in rapid succession, I confess my brain hurts:-) In a way I'm glad I was out of the loop for so long. It prevented me from firing off spur-of-the-moment replies that probably would not have advanced the cause. We seem to be the proverbial blind men trying to agree a description of an elephant when each is touching a different part. One of my personality traits is to encourage academic exercises. Even when their result has no practical merit they usually help illuminate the subject; however, often they lead to practical improvements, and occasionally they lead to entirely new ways of doing things. I see no reason why the present speculative line of inquiry can't proceed alongside the continued maintenance and extension of our existing LinuxCNC program. As long as there are LinuxCNC users who depend on CAM-system post-processors or use multiple commercial machine controllers or employ other software tools that interoperate in the same environment there will be a need for a LinuxCNC RS274/NGC interpreter. So be it. Even if RS274/NGC were the only game in town, I'd still like to see work done to describe the interpretation process more formally. At the same time, I see no reason why this speculative line of inquiry about our command language can't consider alternative methods of telling CNC machines what to do. Market acceptance doesn't seem to me to be a useful metric here. The "market" has a funny way of making up its collective mind---I won't bore with a recitation of successes and failures in technology-driven markets---but it can only accept or reject technologies that have been reduced to practice. Besides, what market are we talking about? I'm a LinuxCNC user who doesn't use commercial CAM software. Granted, the command language we use is reasonably well described and I've been able to write files myself, using text editors or various G-code wizards, but I'd be happy also to have more facile ways available to create a part. I suspect but can't prove this is true for a number of LinuxCNC users. As well, some LinuxCNC users are working with machines whose behaviors lie well outside the envelope of traditional CNC machining centers. I suspect they also would not be unhappy to see new ways of commanding LinuxCNC. Even among hardcore industrial users of traditional CNC machining centers there is an embryonic market for alternatives to the status quo. As only one external example, there is the long-running STEP-NC project that includes some very big global players who clearly wish for something better. The bottom line is, I hope we continue our inquiries. Regards, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Virtualization & Cloud Management Using Capacity Planning Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing also focuses on allowing computing to be delivered as a service. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51521223/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
