Way back in the early days of EMC2 the first OEM to pick it up was Sherline.
Next came Smithy tools. Then nothing new for years until EMC2 morphed into LinuxCNC by force and matured both in features and hardware support to the point that the next OEM to pick up LinuxCNC was Tormach with there own branded version. This was the biggest jump, still within the pro-sumer market and not a major OEM machine builder. The best part of this is it exposed many high end hobbyists to LinuxCNC and many of those had other home conversion CNC equipment that was a perfect match to expand LinuxCNC use. I admit the Rongfu has also made LCNC an option on some of its lower end turn key CNC mills. I have yet to actually see one in the U.S. but the home website claims they are available. Seriously though, its going to take another major OEM to adopt LinuxCNC to give us the exposure needed to attract major user share. Also as our Power users get better, making more custom POST options which make use of LCNC for Fusion 360 would help dramatically. Seimens and several new noname Chi-com control makers are now gaining market share in both new machine builds and retrofits.You can give credit to Microsoft for demonizing Windows XP for the drop in Mach 3 users - that and the MACH team dropping of further development of that product. On the other hand FADAL is becoming a footnote in history and there are alot of those machines out there with no real factory support or upgrade options. HAAS swallowed up FADAL's market share as they dropped out of the picture and did it with a more user friendly control - albeit one which I consider lousy in its actual G-Code execution when compared to FANUC or MAZAK. I am also not a fan of the HAAS machines themselves, they had the highest percentage of down time and highest cost of repairs of any brand I have ever used. That applies to both the milling and turning centers. In one respect LinuxCNC's biggest strength is also it biggest weakness. The fact that LCNC is a virtual one size fits all means that most applications are unique. Tormach has only a few configs to deal with, but is putting out the greatest number of LCNC equipped machines. LCNC requires its machine integrators to do there home work and solve problems. Lazy people hate homework. Others just are afraid to try Linux - yet God knows there are enough MAC users out there and most have no clue whats really happening under the hood of their hardware, all they know is it mostly works. People fail to believe that Linux is the same thing, it mostly just works. Greg, Out yonder in Colorado. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
