EMC development black hole

[Vigilant]

About five years ago, we gave some of our I/O boards to a Linux software developer in England who was going to write drivers for EMC. We initially had a workiing email address for him, but frankly he would not take direction from us and was not responsive to our requests for information on what he was doing. He eventually sent us a CD, we set up a PC, loaded linux, and struggled for some time with the install. There was zero documentation about our products, the documentation about the INI file was full of errors. After a lot of struggle we figured out some of it and got one of our old ISA boards to run a servo motor using EMC. We no longer can contact that developer by email.

For some time now, the linuxcnc site has been stating that EMC supports one or more of our boards, but I can't get any information. Which of our boards are supported? What functions of our boards are supported? I get phone calls asking for information from people asking me the same questions and I can't answer them. The linuxcnc and sourceforge sites are useless to me, and I have no desire to wade through their forums. When I try clicking on their "contact the Board of Directors" email link, that just generates errors stating that I must enable javascript (it already is enabled). I am pretty frustrated. If anybody out there that has a contact link, address, phone number, email, whatever so that I can contact a human, please let me know. Thanks.

John Rowland
Vigilant Products
admin@vigproducts.com

[samco]

thanks for letting us know, the board was notified, and will reply by email soon. the problems with cloaking emails on the website have been resolved now.

[Vigilant]

Yesterday, after I whined on cnczone, I received a very informative email from Mr. Henry at EMC. It turns out that I had been knocking on the wrong door. He has now fixed the links to their email, and he provided me with contact information for the correct developer. So I amend my earlier statement about EMC not being supportive or communicative, it appears they can be reached and do respond.

I intend to follow up, I have learned the EMC does support some of the features of one of our boards, I would like to see more of our functionality supported, so I am going to ask what help they need and see what I can do to make it happen. Here, I probably need to set up a Linux platform, so that I can test and evaluate their product. Maybe we need to go ahead and do a machine retrofit ourselves here in our shop, I think that may be the best way to explore what the EMC software can do with our hardware.

J. Rowland