I was at a Mini Maker Faire this past weekend. Had 3000 people attend. Of the 1000, or so, who stopped by our booth which had 5 milling machines, I don't think more than a dozen were machinists or had an interest in learning to be machinists.
What was common - extremely common - were people who wanted to know how machining could help them. The simply wanted to know the process. CAD. CAM. Machine. They were purely interested in what they could make with the machines, not the parameters and ways the machines worked. They wanted to be able to put something in and then pull something of the machine for what they were building. I certainly did meet several people who knew about Linuxcnc. Some were machinists. Some were Linux zealots. What they were generally lacking was any sort of user focus. That might be an interesting exercise here. Take some milling machines to Mini Maker Faires in your area - they have them in most states now - and throw up the various screens and see what people think. People ran Mach - and Linuxcnc - because they were machinists and these were software packages for machinists. Its not a fight about Windows, or Linux.. It really is a fight about people interact with the machines. On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Charles Steinkuehler < char...@steinkuehler.net> wrote: > On 10/08/13 18:08, Charles Buckley wrote: > > The paradigm is shifting also when you get to 3D printers. They want > > appliance and appliance like behavior. Zero interest in becoming > > machinists. > > This applies to hackerspaces too. Most hackerspaces, and even quite a > few hobby users now have serious milling machines like a Tormach or > 'baby' milling machines like a Fireball. These need to work like an > appliance without requiring someone who _really_ knows what they're > doing to configure the software. It might be practical to have a > LinuxCNC guru setup and configure the retrofit of a room sized chunk of > iron, but that doesn't apply to the mini-mills and desktop CNC hardware > that is becoming common. > > -- > Charles Steinkuehler > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60134071&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
