> From: Eric Keller [mailto:[email protected]] > On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 12:11 PM Mark <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Folks seem to clamor quite a > > bit how all this is going to die out and we need to change this, that > > and every other thing to enable all these other platforms. Yet, none of > > them seem to want to grab the software and change it to their wants or > > needs. It always seems the developers must change their wants. Tormach > > proved that wasn't necessary. > > > > Mark > > > > It's not too many folks, but the same ones make a lot of noise. It seems > to me that there are some nice gcode senders out there that could do what > the noisy people want with less work than adapting linuxcnc to be a gcode > sender with an as-of-yet undefined distributed control interface on the > other end of a non-real time network interface. > > Granted, that's a whole lot of work. > Eric Keller
I think first it would be appropriate to not use words like whine or clamor or noise. A comment was made about the people who joined the group thinking about LinuxCNC and then left. It's easy to misconstrue some of these comments or words as demeaning or debasing and in general the Linux community has a bit of a reputation of replying to posts with statements like: "This information is on line or has already been answered so do your homework and don't bother us with uniformed questions" Sadly, when someone is starting they don't know what they don't know and don't know where to look to find out what they don't know. Add to that the time line of the internet and postings and the amount of out of date material that often shows up far more often because it's been referenced often it's really difficult for someone new to get a sense of what to do or how things work. For example, I'm sure there are LinuxCNC users out there who have no idea of what a joint is in LinuxCNC. And there's the crux of the problem with a hobbyist who wants to add CNC to his equipment. They might add a 4th axis. Certainly not interested in a 16 joint robot. (Well they might be...) So that new guy does his research, looks at the web site after googling "LinuxCNC Axis" and ends up here: http://linuxcnc.org/docs/html/gui/axis.html His friend has MACH3 on WIN-XP but he doesn't and really doesn't want to try and get WIN-XP running on the surplus PC he has for the CNC shop. His friend shows him all the wizards that make simple operations on the mill trivial. So he reads the doc and can't find an equivalent. It's not an AXIS menu item. He asks a question like "Is there a menu entry or some Wizards like in MACH3?" and is told: "Learn G-Code. You'll need it anyway no matter what". Notice that isn't an answer to his question. Another common type of response is "Yes you can add all sorts of screens and things like wizards to LinuxCNC." Nothing more. Remember, this new user has never written a line of software in his life. He's picked up metal working as a hobby because he likes model trains and would like to build a steam engine now that he's close to retirement. (or some other reason that a person buys a mill and a lathe). So I don't think it's whining or complaining to suggest that a nice feature to add to the AXIS interface would be another menu entry for called say "Operations". And fill it in with one item to perform a surfacing operation G-Code program that is then loaded. Then in the manual add a section that shows how to add to that list. One possible approach is to make that list an XML file which can be edited with free programs like XMLNotepad. There's probably something like that in the Linux world too. The main menu entry is "Operations" Underneath that the name of an operation like "Surfacing" and the file name of the program that is run to create the dialog and interact with a user. The "Operations" dialog on save returns a pointer to the file name and then just like opening a G-Code file it's loaded. Now AXIS has the ability to run Wizards written in any language. I've used this example because I'd like to see something like the MACH3 wizards in the Axis interface. But I haven't a clue where to start and since I don't do development on Linux systems (other than Pi or Beagle) I couldn't even rebuild Axis if I wanted to. Ie. I don't have a development PC that has Linux on it. But I can write using Lazarus and test all these types of dialogs on a WIN-7 or WIN-10 PC and on a Pi. And at least I write software for a living. That hobbyist I've mentioned just leaves the list and buys something else. Doesn't say goodbye. Just leaves. And perhaps we shouldn't care. John Dammeyer _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
