Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Re: Black box heaven or the real BDI

> This notion of a reliable but geeky OS running unseen beneath a user-
> friendly GUI sounds awfully familiar. Isn't that what Mac OS X
> offers,=20
> built on an open source variant of Unix rather than Linux? Is it=20
> possible that after a decade or more of being presumed irrelevant to=20
> CNC, the new Mac OS might change the picture for that platform? That=20
> would be great news for the fine arts community, where the Mac has=20
> considerable acceptance, and where the lack of CNC capability is a=20
> frustration.

Now that is an interesting idea, however modern macs are not great in
the department of simple, low latency, low overhead I/O. You would
probably have to use usb, ethernet, or firewire - which means you
might as well do the realtime stuff in a black box. Also the drivers
for these ports run under the operating system, so new ones would have
to be written if realtime code wanted to access them from outside the
os. If the realtime stuff is all in the box, then communication to it
is not time critical and everything can run under the operating system

If the hardware communication problem could be solved, then maybe
doing the realtime stuff on the mac would be possible. OS-X is based
on BSD unix, so it should be possible to adapt it so it will run it
under a real time schedule like the way RT-linux works, it would take
some work. And one would have to either make sure that this fit FSM
lab's definintion of a free operationg system, or license their patent
for money, or decide that it was worth ignoring/fighting.

But it could be cool to have OS X as one of a number of supported
platforms.

Chris Stratton

-------------------------------------------------
Christopher C. Stratton
Engineer, Instrument Maker, and Horn Player
ccs@... 617 628 1062
http://web.mit.edu/~stratton/www/brassbuild.html