I went to lunch the other day with Dale Grover and Bob Stack, both of the A2 MechShop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dale asked me about this year's CNC Workshop which he usually attends, and I told him of the situation with Roland and Cardinal Engineering. I had also remarked that Ann Arbor has a very active technical community (I've been to one meeting of one of the local clubs so far and it was well attended). Dale said that he had been considering what he could do if the regular Cardinal Engineering Workshop couldn't be held this year and that evening, wrote me:
----------- There are at least two venues in Ann Arbor, MI for hosting an EMC conference: Smithy (where it was held a few years ago), and A2 MechShop. Coincidentally, they're about 1/4 mile apart on Ann Arbor's west side. Ann Arbor is 40 minutes from Detroit Metro Airport, is home to the University of Michigan, and has a fair number of high tech firms locally. NAMES is April 18-19 this year in Toledo, Ohio, about 45 minutes away. http://www.modelengineeringsoc.com/expo.htm Might be nice to schedule near the same time, but not required. A2 MechShop is a 3,500 sq ft building shared by four partners, all small entrepreneurial engineers. We have small to medium size machine tools (mills, lathes, etc), and a few small CNC machines (mills, laser engraver, CNC engraver). We would probably set up tables in the part of the shop we use for meetings (we host the Ypsilanti-AnnArbor Area Robotic Club and GO-Tech: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/notbago/). Internet (wired/wireless), video projector, kitchen area, big overhead doors, can borrow forklift from our landlord (who has a CNC machine shop next door to us). (240 Parkland Plaza, Ann Arbor, MI 48103) ----------- To Dale's description above, I can add: Smithy has tens of thousands of square feet of warehouse space, give or take a few, and sells machine tools both manual and CNC. Facilities include a T1 Internet connection, tables, single and three phase electricity, machine shop (manual mill and lathe) and plenty of space for setting up machines. Smithy sells both CNC mills and lathes, and given some advance notice could make some of these available for software development and testing purposes. (170 Aprill Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48103) Anyway, I think we should start to talk about what our options are as I'm sure everyone looks forward to the yearly get-together. If anyone has alternative ideas, just reply to this thread with the information! Thanks, Matt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
