Re: Black boxes

--- In CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO@y..., ron ginger <ronginger@r...> wrote:
>Indexer has 2 other big problems- cost and control.<s> If I have to
>start with a $350 program there is little room for me to make any
>money. I dont begrudge Art making money, I hope he does well. Its
>just too expensive to be part of my program. His competition is
>Master5 and things like CNCpro that are in the $100-200 range.

Yep, exactly. At least in the hobby market.

>Windows is a fine GUI- Visual Basic can do some great GUI stuff with
>great simplicity. In just a couple hours you can hack out a whole new
>interface to a controller. If I could send a simple serial stream to
>a black box to handle the real time stuff, then I can make a lot of
>very interesting human interfaces.

Again, YES! But there is little money to be made selling black boxes
UN-BUNDLED, IMO. People expect little electronic gizmos to be cheap.
But they will pay thousands for software, if it does what they want.
The b-box becomes copy protection and a means to the end of selling
the UI (which is why Flashcut probably won't sell it).

>I also don't like tieing the control logic to the power driver-

More YES; and I wish simplestep(and some others) realised that this
was often the case. I have seen more than a few systems which
appeared to have promise, but because they were "tied" to the
drivers...

>I want to do more than just 'move a few buttons around the screen' My
>interest is in the home shop space, and I favor a totally different
>approach to part making- I used to call this 'conversation
>programming'

Me too! But I would like to see gcode as the "underneath native"
somewhere. This would allow the s/w to be used to create code for
other machines. And also allow editing the "canned" code that
conversational is sometimes limited by.

Side note: Have you considered just offering your program as a code
creator? A different sort of cam? Go through the conversational
screens and spit out the gcode. (no drawing allowed/needed)

>As to Flashcut, I dont want to steal anyting from them-If they want
>to bundle their hardware and software, fine, thats their call. But
>if they would open the interface then I could write my program and
>maybe sell a few copies to guys with the right hardware that wanted
>to try a different interface for some work. It's like buying a radio
>that was fixed to only one station. Sometimes I'd like to listen to
>a different drummer.

Covered above.

>And thats my final point- I dont think any one software package is
>the 'RIGHT' one- for some jobs I'd like to use Gcode, but for others
>it's much faster to use a differnt interface. I have a lot of
>software on my PC, why should I be stuck with one CNC interface.
>ron ginger

I get private emails all the ime asking which control is "best". Or
which control do *you* use?

And I have to answer, none!; and "many of them"...