Re: RESOLVED: EMC is poorly designed and implemented.

["Pete Cook" <kf2qd-at-terraworld.net>]

A couple more thoughts on EMC and how poorly or not it is written -

My personal belief is that EMC could still be classified as beta, with ideas
still in development along with the development of those ideas. It is a
complex project in a rather narrow field and thus there is some limit to the
number of developers/coders/troubleshooters that are able to be involved
along with the need for many of us to get up to speed with Linux and X as
well as to get familiar with the programming environment.

Is there any one programmer who can devote anything more than hobby time to
work on EMC? Is there any involvement by a corporately sponsorred
programmer? Is there anyone at NIST or elsewhere who is putting 10 hours or
more a week into improving EMC?

Might there be more involvement if the OS were something other than Linux? I
am thinking more of a DOS or FreeDos environment. Considerring that CNC's in
the past have run on single Z80 based hardware it would seem to me that we
have way more than the minimum hardware to get the job done.  I know that it
is easier to get network devices and other such standard computer hardware
to work when using an existing OS that provides the support for those
devices rather than having to code them for an OS that does not support
them.

Another approach would to move EMC off the main CPU and onto a PCI or ISA
type card - yes this would require the design of special hardware, but it
would make the OS of less importance. This approach would still allow easy
to change runtime software (load it from the host computer each time the
computer runs) and use some standard devices such as the US Dgital chips for
the encoders, an appropriate D2A converter and some I/O and a safety
interlock - I would think that this could be built wire wrapped on an ISA
card with reasonable reliabibity for under 500$ - which is about 1/3 the
cheapest standalone card out there - and you don't have any acces to the
real code on those cards. With a different set of devices on the output side
you would have a stepper card - along with the ability to play with the
source code.

The other advantage to a standalone card is that it can handle problems with
the Operator interface with more grace than just dying - What happens if you
reset Linux while runing EMC?

Not meaning to be a pain, but it never hurts to have a deils advocate around
from time to time -

Pete