I (like many at ShopBot I'm sure) do not spend as much time on the forum as I should. You'll notice this is my first post! I'm relatively new at ShopBot, so I'm going to forgive myself for that. These discussions are important though. We see them. We are taking notes.
I wanted to address some of the FabMo comments directly, since that's squarely my deparment. It is a place where we are doing quite a bit of work, and have made (and continue to make) substantial investment. Mostly, we do not post a lot about it, here or elsewhere, for fear of misrepresenting our timelines to those who are excited about getting their hands on new products. We've been burned by that before, and don't want to get out there with too many details until we're really ready to share.
First of all, we are in the process of moving to version 1.7.0 of FabMo, which will address a lot of the issues that we've identified on Handibot, and will add a number of features that we see as necessary to ship the platform on larger tools, starting with the ShopBot Desktop and MAX, then expanding to the Buddy, and eventually gantry tools. We've suffered some substantial delays in doing so for a number of reasons, not the least of which has been the debacle with the Intel Edison, which I'll discuss below. Even without the issues with the Edison, we're a small team, especially with respect to our software development. It's the case that we have a lot of products that we make and support, and as I'm sure is the case in other companies, sometimes things just take a little longer than they feel like they should to get right. When you're building the plane as you fly it, you always need to make sure you're staying airborne. We're expecting the Desktop switch over to happen over the next few months, with the change for larger tools coming not far thereafter.
Second, FabMo has never, and will not ever depend on the Intel Edison. The Edison was our target for Handibot, for various reasons, but we can and do routinely run it on a number of different hardware devices. It runs under Linux, on MacOS, and on Windows, and we've run it on several SBC platforms, as well as on conventional PCs. My tool at home runs on the TI sitara processor. We've got a few handibots here that run on Raspberry Pis, and most of our development work happens on MacOS X.
Intel really let us down with the Edison. It was a half-baked product that they didn't support well, and that didn't really have a market. They pulled the plug on it without warning, without offering a substitute, and the switch caused us a lot of grief and pain. We should have kicked the tires more when we selected it, but that's water under the bridge now. Fortunately, there didn't seem to be a mad scramble to buy them after Intel canned it, (can't imagine why!) so we were able to purchase enough to continue with Handibot production until we have a replacement, and keep repair stock for a good long time, so we can continue to support customers with Handibots.
It's a shoddy craftsman that blames his tools, however, and in the wake of the Edison, we have been hard at work on an alternative design, which will be the foundation of the products that go out in the larger tools. This one is done with an ARM processor from the ground up, and one that has a guaranteed product longevity, both from the chip-maker and the SOM vendor, who is a reputable supplier that deals regularly in the industrial and automotive markets, so that we can be sure that we'll be able to supply and support the product for at least as long as we've been supplying and supporting the ShopBot legacy products that people use today. It's also a platform that has a robust upgrade path, so that as technology advances, our control systems can advance with it. I'm in the process of reviewing that design even as I write this, and I'm hopeful that we'll be testing that in the next couple of weeks.
As for everything else, all I can really promise here is that we are listening, and we are working hard to make things better. We don't get to bite off all the initiatives we'd like all at once. Indeed, many of the suggestions made here are things that we've debated and discussed internally for some time. We'll continue to press ahead on the things that we've got the bandwidth to get done, and keep listening and discussing here as much as we can.