RE: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Re: Re: Re: HARDINGE HNC RETROFIT

So who is the company that complained?

Regards,
JJ

Be Kind, Be Careful, Be Yourself

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matt Shaver [mailto:mshaver@...]
> Sent: Saturday, September 21, 2002 9:21 PM
> To: CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Re: Re: Re: HARDINGE HNC RETROFIT
>
>
> On Friday 20 September 2002 10:51 am, you wrote:
> > Hi Matt,
> >
> > Is NIST still working on EMC, I thought they kind of abandoned it.
> > What is their official word on further development?
> >
> > Bill
>
> Since I'm not an official representative of NIST, I can't
> really give you the
> "official word" ;) , but I'll tell you what I think:
>
> "No good deed goes unpunished." - Claire Booth Luce (1903-1987)
>
> 1. The EMC was originally developed as part of NIST's
> involvement with the
> OMAC (Open Modular Architecture Controls) Users Group. See
> this document,
> pages 19-20:
>
> http://www.arcweb.com/omac/Techdocs/Open_at_GMPTG.pdf
>
> 2. As far as I know, NIST needs the EMC to do work in several current
> projects such as STEP-NC and some specialized equipment for
> the Navy. Since
> their use of the EMC in research is ongoing, I expect they
> will continue to
> contribute new code and bug fixes generated as a result of
> this and other
> future work.
>
> 3. NIST has a longstanding and rigidly enforced policy of not
> recommending or
> endorsing any commercial product, even though in the ordinary
> course of their
> projects they purchase and use many commercial products, if
> those products
> meet their specifications. The work with OMAC required a cnc
> control that
> came with all the source code. At the time (early 90's), such
> a thing didn't
> exist as all controls of that era were at least partially
> proprietary. For
> all I know, if TurboCNC had existed ten years ago, they
> would've bought it
> and based their work on its source code!
>
> 4. NIST is also not in the business of competing with
> commercial enterprises.
> Since their work is of the "breaking new ground" variety, and
> since they have
> the means to purchase nearly anything that they require, it's
> faster and
> makes more sense for them to use commercially available
> products in their
> work whenever that's possible. It's also the cheapest way to
> accomplish their
> goals because their effective labor rate is very high (this
> means that it
> costs them a lot of money to reinvent the wheel, so they try
> never to do it).
>
> 5. All the intellectual work of public employees (that's not
> classified) is
> free of copyright and in the public domain where it can be
> used by anyone for
> any purpose, including development and improvement of
> commercial products.
> I've retrofitted and sold a few machine tools using the EMC
> software, and
> there are also quite a few hobbyists who've used the EMC to
> control their
> machine tool projects. I know that several commercial cnc
> control programs
> have incorporated sections of the code (particularly Tom
> Kramer's g-code
> interpreter), thereby saving development time. I still hope
> that eventually a
> major manufacturer of cnc machines will elect to use the EMC
> as their control
> program. I had hoped it would be Bridgeport, but they decided
> to go out of
> business instead...
>
> 6. A year or so ago, the main repository of code was moved to
> Sourceforge so
> that the growing number of independent developers could
> collaborate in the
> process of extending and improving the source code. New
> hardware support was
> added, the installation procedure was greatly simplified,
> documentation was
> updated, and the existing user interface was extended (and
> new GUIs were
> added) by non NIST personnel. The bulk of this work was
> released under the
> GPL and the GNU Free Documentation Licence.
>
> 7. Not long ago a small software company called NIST to
> complain that the EMC
> was competing (apparently successfully) with their product.
> The folks at NIST
> explained everything in items #1-#6 above, but they still
> objected to the EMC
> web pages at NIST's site
> (http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/projects/emc/). When
> the company followed up their phone complaint with a letter,
> the pages had to
> be removed. Some of the information on those pages was
> outdated, and most of
> the really useful stuff is available elsewhere (
> http://www.linuxcnc.org ).
> My picture, taken I think in 1996 during a demo of the first
> Bridgeport mill
> retrofit, was on the software page. I'm sorry it's gone, it
> was mortar in my
> facade of respectability (perhaps more than I really
> deserved). If you've
> never seen these pages (and are morbidly curious), you can
> just set the
> wayback machine to the year 2001, like so:
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/projects/emc/
>
> 8. I think the next steps to take are:
>
> A. Write some really good documentation that explains how
> everything works
> in the code. This is really needed to get new developers up
> to speed in a
> reasonable time. I've done some research into software tools
> that help with
> this task, but it's still a time consuming process. I don't
> really see any
> alternative though, and I'm probably the one who'll have to do it...
>
> B. While doing "A", we can also go through the code, make sure it's
> formatted nicely, and see if it would benefit from some
> reorganization.
> There've been changes and changes, and changes to changes,
> and it might be
> time for a "spring cleaning". If so, the updated code might
> be able to be
> GPLed if it's done outside of NIST.
>
> C. While doing "B", we should probably try to make the IO
> system easier to
> extend by incorporating something like:
>
> http://mat.sourceforge.net
>
> or
>
> http://membres.lycos.fr/mavati/classicladder/
>
> or both...
>
> Thanks for asking,
> Matt
>
> "The lady protests too much, methinks." - WS (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2.)
>
> > Well, Linux/EMC is still very rant-worthy: incredibly
> bloated, still buggy,
> > long steep learning curve. Others will say what they will,
> but the best
> > bang/buck ratio IMHO is Indexer-LPT from Ability Systems
> Corp. It's simple,
> > powerful, easy to use. ASC is now offering a G-code
> interpreter which seems
> > to be up to their usual standards, or a good alternative
> choice for running
> > I-LPT would be our own Axis Wizard.
> >
> > Regards, Hoyt McKagen
>
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