ShopBot Labs is live

[bill.young]

We've started a new section on the ShopBot site called ShopBot Labs that will make projects available that are under development. Some may just need a little final testing but others might still be pretty rough around the edges...it's all described in each project's page. If you're feeling adventuresome, check it out.

[gerald_d]

The sTunes is a hoot, I think that Bill is trying to get himself some free wine

I'd better go and check if it is still there under the cobwebs....

[john_david]

Gerald I think your right but with a guy thatspend this much time playing with the Shopbot When would he have time to drink it
LOL

JD

[zeykr]

Bill, Looks like fun to play with. I was hoping maybe you were putting out the source in an open source development type of thing. I'd like to try making a coordinate measuring machine version of copy machine.

[bill.young]

Hey Ken,

The simple answer first. The Copy Machine is really just a front end for the DOS probing routines to make it easier to change settings. It writes a custom ShopBot file named "vt_probe.sbp" that does the real work, but that file is really just a standard probing file with your values filled in. Once you've run the Copy Machine once you can find that file in the "C:\Program files\ShopBot\virtual Tools\Copy Machine" folder and then modify it to do what you want.

Now the more complicated one. I'm certainly agreeable to and interested in making source code available for some of my projects...there are a couple of examples in the Developer Tools folder in the ShopBot folder...and would like to do more of it. There are a few obstacles to doing it though that have to be sorted out...

*) The language that it's written in. I use VB6 for just about everything because it quick and easy and I'm comfortable with it, but it's not available any more and therefore not a good choice to base an open source project on. I've been looking at Microsoft's free Express tools and am thinking that they might be a good option for open sourcing code...there could be both VB.net and C# versions of programs. They are quite a bit different than what I'm used to though...it boils down to the "old dog/ new tricks" problem.

*) It's really a whole lot more work to open source software than it is to just develop for your eyes only because you either have to put the time into commenting it enough to make it obvious to others how it works, or put the time into explaining it afterwards when someone wants to work with it. It's easy to hack something together that works, but not so easy to make it clear to others how it's doing it. In a word, laziness!

One thing that I think could work well as open source projects are scripts for other programs like Rhino and Sketchup. I'm planning on adding some very rough scripts for both of them to ShopBot Labs at some point...seems like they have a lot of collaborative potential.

Bill

[bill.young]

Hey,

The bug reports are already trickling in! A new version of the odometer was uploaded yesterday and a new version of the SketchPad this evening.

The names of the new zip files end in "_001b.zip"...if the version you have ends in "_001.zip" then you'll need to re-download to get the new one.

Bill

[geneb]

Bill, I have to laugh at the sTunes trick. It made me recall a fun memory about playing the William Tell Overture on my Commodore 64's 1541 disk drives head mechanism back in '85 or so.


g.

[geneb]

Almost forgot! Borland has release Turbo Delphi for windows as a free download at http://www.turboexplorer.com.

You can't add any third party components to the control palette, but other than that it's a fully operational and unrestricted compiler. For those that have used Turbo Pascal in past years should find Turbo Delphi very enjoyable!

g.

[oscarg1971]

Commodore 64? What's that? :-) -OG

[gerald_d]

that was the best-selling PC ever! 64 kilobyte RAM.