The "Gold Standard" for conversational control has been Hurco. Hurco trademarked the term "conversational control" sometime back in the late 70's or early 80's.
And in fact someone once asserted that Hurco had made more money through lawsuits of trademark and copy write infringement than they had selling machine tools. That aside, if you have had an extended opportunity to use a Hurco control you would likely agree they have pretty well owned the idea. I have 2 Hurco mills in my shop now. Both dead. One is in process of getting a LinuxCNC retrofit. The other I hope to restore to the OEM config. The one which I hope to restore was damaged while in storage while I was relocating my shop. Since it was not in use, mice decided it would make a great Hotel. They got in to the control pendant support arm and made nests inside the control console. They pissed all over a few PCB's and chewed through several cables. I consider myself very lucky as the mill getting the LinuxCNC retrofit will be supplying perfect condition replacement parts for the mouse damage. When running a Hurco in Conversational mode you never saw a G-Code. Now it appears that you can add G-Code in the current WinMax system. I have only used Ultimax II, and Max32. I still have not seen anything that can go from paper print to part faster than the Hurco Conversational system. OTOH the motion of the earlier (DOS - 8086-80386) versions were not as optimal as an expert hand written G-code program for mass production. For lots under 1K it was hard to beat. The Hurco was in a shop I worked at years ago along with Okuma and Mori Seiki high speed VMC's. The Hurco was the 2nd oldest CNC in the shop and yet it could finish a job in the time it took the CAD/CAM team to have a production ready program and setup on the "high speed" machines. To get a good idea of how well the software worked watch this demo video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=34&v=v3Gtw0pazn4 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
