What should an open source plasma cnc controller have ? At what price?

thefabricator03 wrote: Then come up with some baseline parameters the customer can use and write them a instruction guide on how to fine tune the settings for their specific machine?

Really, if the motors are locked in at a specific reduction, and everything wired up, the only parameters that might need changing is velocity, acceleration and scale. That would not be hard to script in Python as it has built in ini file readers.

I also think once you have a very solid product(which your very much already do!), you need to buckle down on your marketing.

Look at the other company's marketing, slick website with a web store that is easy to use. They still keep selling their product even though its not quite as easy to use and robust but they can still get people to put in their credit card details and shipping address!

thefabricator03 wrote:
Seeing your builds Tom, I would comfortably say that your not going to end up like the other company!.
......
.......If I can build a controller from reading your forum posts and have it run 10 hours a day for over a year with no issues, I am sure with your knowledge you will do much better than I can.

Thank you.

thefabricator03 wrote: Would it be possible to build a testing device that could replicate a real machine. That way you could just set the controller up and say let it run over night.

Yes it would, but i do not like that, i like to test the worst case scenarios, like remove the ground wire and forget the plasma clamp then turn on the torch while the torch cable is rolled around the electronics box! If that does not burn it, nothing will, as got proven today due to a momentary laps of reason, nothing died, the machine works perfectly despite 4 cuts done with plasma clamp grounded through the machine and PC having no ground attached. This would be the worst case scenario that other worst case scenarios are afraid off !

thefabricator03 wrote: Then come up with some baseline parameters the customer can use and write them a instruction guide on how to fine tune the settings for their specific machine?

That would be the easy part as i am perfectly good with setting up everything in case the client knows the ratios and some other details, in any case quite easy to do, not so easy to do it so everyone understands it.
Rods idea of running a python script to set up the machine is very nice.
Also making some backup configs is nice t have in case of an error.

thefabricator03 wrote: I personally believe that if you were to sell them for $3000 but if they did not break down or have any issues, you would have a hard time keeping up with demand once word got around.

I wish ! By now most of you know about how much trouble i have with sourcing parts, so till it gets to ordering by 100 it will be very hard to keep up with a single one per month.
And the worst of it is : if anyone has the slightest issue with any of it, i will eat myself alive as i can not jump in my car and drive there in half an hour to fix it. Usually that is my response time, and last month was terrible as i was getting about 4 hours of sleep per night for nearly 3 weeks. The best thing was only one of those calls was for a retrofit i did 4 years ago, the rest was new clients, and all had minor issues so most of the time was spent driving to and from.

Tommy, sounds like you need to try out Teamviewer for Linux so you can easily remote into your clients PC and see whats going on before you jump in the car...

rodw wrote: Tommy, sounds like you need to try out Teamviewer for Linux so you can easily remote into your clients PC and see whats going on before you jump in the car...

Being in cybersecurity for over 15 years i have a hard time asking anyone to install that (although some do install it for no reason at all ), though it is useful sometimes, uninstalling it the instant you are done would be a sound advice.
That means giving full control over the PC to someone (me) and to a company that sells every thing they collect and have access to that said PC at any given time.