How many CNC machine startup's have there been in the past few years?
Maybe a handful in some niche markets? The vendors in China offer the
popular CNC controllers that we all are accustomed to or use ARM
controllers similar to NVEM.
There have been several additive manufacturing start ups in the past few
years but their investors and business strategy requires them to start
from scratch and reinvent the wheels of PC controllers, Mesa FPGAs and
LCNC. They don't want anything to be shared with their competition even
though it can shave years off of getting a machine to market.
On 1/26/23 10:37, Stuart Stevenson wrote:
"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."
Perhaps thankless but Tormach has built a presumably profitable business by
doing exactly that.
And then packaging and selling the hardware to match.
An added dimension many (me included) do not want to tackle.
Overall, I am very impressed (and satisfied) with the capability and
progress.
thanks
Stuart
On Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 9:33 AM <ken.stra...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
"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."
Perhaps thankless but Tormach has built a presumably profitable business by
doing exactly that.
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Keller <keller...@gmail.com>
Sent: January 26, 2023 10:01 AM
To: Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC) <emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Emc-users] Running PathPilot on non-Tormach Machines
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
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