Re: cookbook

[Ray Henry <rehenry-at-up.net>]

You may be as sick of my cookbook analogy as I am but after reading Ian's
post and several others I think that we will need chapters on cooking with
the plain vanilla EMC.  I'm even wondering if we should include a section
for the curious that suggests possible applications to help people dream a
bit.  "Yes honey, the EMC is scalable. You could install it on your linux
thinkpad, use the parallel port to control your four wheeler and use the
onstar module from the wrecked caddy as a GPS for position feedback."

The table of contents that was suggested recently will have some great
reading in it - and I need some of those chapters for myself - but many of
us aren't up to writing much of those parts.  And yet each of us has
experience to contribute that will help others understand what can be done
with this software.

We need some real good stuff on how to customize the existing emc package
to fit different machines and different environments. Jon E has done quite
a bit with this on cad_cam... faq. We can all work on how to set up the
.ini to take maximum advantage of what we've downloaded.  We can all
contribute to the linux sections.  Several can contribute to the hmi/gui
sections.

In addition to the content list circulated, I think that we also need stuff
on hooking it up to motors and switches and making it go safely.  Here is
where many of us can contribute.  We also need a comprehensive page of
books, papers, and links to assist folk as they move into an EMC application.

Those technical chapters on expanding or customizing parts of the EMC will
come but we shouldn't let them be our writers block right now.

My last thought is that we should not allow the cookbook project to kill
off  our other to-do's - like the graphics based programming and the
ocasional trial balloons that we send up on this list.

Happy Holidays

Ray