On Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 8:24 AM <ken.stra...@sympatico.ca> wrote: > To me this is the minimum level of magic required to make a commercially > viable product. The vast majority of potential users are uncomfortable (or > don't want to bother) with manually modifying configuration files. Of course > the power of LinuxCNC is due to the possibility of configuring things for > all sorts of hardware. Without magic the flexibility means that it will > never be mainstream.
Nobody wants to give up the flexibility though. The problem that lcnc has is aptly summarized in this thread where someone gave up because they wanted to use an Rpi4 and ethercat. That's fine, and there are plenty of people that have ethercat running with lcnc, maybe even on a Rpi4. But both the Rpi4 and ethercat require a bit of messing around, I think, and neither are really mainline lcnc. Getting a 3 axis running on a Mesa board on a PC with decent latency (another sticking point, unfortunately) is trivial. Someone mentioned 4 axis. The problem with that is that everyone has their own 4th axis. This is also the problem with lcnc in general. I would say more than 90% of the problems I see with people having trouble setting up lcnc is they have a totally nonstandard install that wouldn't work with any other software either. So they can't get it to work with lcnc, buy something standard, and go install Mach. And then badmouth lcnc any time the subject comes up. The people that want to make lcnc more popular could do something about it, I think. Define a set of hardware that works and make their own distribution with only one user interface. It doesn't surprise me that nobody wants to do this thankless task. Eric Keller Boalsburg, Pennsylvania _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
