Re: EHP External Hardware Proposal

> From: hansw <hansw@...>
> I wonder how the government in all it's wisdom decided to put our tax money

into writing EMC ?

> Was there a committee on the subject ?
> Did the CNC industry ask them ? I often wonder about stuff like that.

From:
http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/projects/emc/

"The EMC is part of a broader industry group, the Open Modular Architecture
Controller. The purpose of the group is to establish a specific set of APIs
to be used by vendors to sell controller products and services to the
aerospace and automotive industry. EMC participation is focused on validating
the APIs and developing measures of conformance."

A short list of OMAC members:
http://www.arcweb.com/omac/members2.htm

> If indeed it is our tax money that is developing a "cheaper" solution, will

the source code be public also ? If not what is the point ?

> If it is public, where is the source for the Windows NT version ?
> I only found a demo exe, and that's not enough to check see if the code is

upto it...

> Maybe we have to wait the standard 30 years and then the archives will

release it?

The file:

ftp://ftp.isd.mel.nist.gov/pub/emc/emcsoft/winnt/emcdemo.exe

is a self extracting archive that has the source and pre-compiled executables
in it. All of the EMC source code, and the source code of the Real-time
Control System that underlies it is in the public domain. As a matter of
fact, the Linux version is distributed as source only and has to be compiled
by the end user. I wasn't sure that the source was in the above file, nor had
I ever run it, so I downloaded the whole 12MB file just so that I could
provide a good answer to your questions. I installed it on my own Win95
machine, but I couldn't get it to run. It couldn't find WS2_32.dll. I'll have
to work on this and get back to you. Another issue is that it uses the Java
based user interface, while most people running the Linux version are using
the tcl/tk (or X-windows) interface. Tcl/tk is available for Windows, so I'll
have to see what's involved in getting that to work.

Matt