Of course you are, most everyone at SB has had their hand in this at one time or another, including myself. The reality is that since the swap to a USB connection in ~2003, what else has anyone at SB been working on? Don't feel alone, virtually every other controller that adopted a USB connection suffered the same woes. Actually, you can feel alone, virtually all of them have solved it.
Writings on the wall. One of the smartest guys out there, one that to this day I feel privileged to have worked for, combined with the smartest guys/gals he could hire have not solved that problem in 15 freakin years. In the real world, if you do not succeed, you fail. Period.
You say: "If you want to watch the painful progress then come over to the handibot forum and watch people gripe at me about all the issues we've yet to solve with FabMo -- "
From the first day Matt placed the prototype Handybot on a meeting table I have been unimpressed. It was a toy made from plastic. When asked at that meeting for my "best uses" for the toy, I had 2 responses. One is best not repeated here in public, but the other was: "Put it in the middle of the table, cut a hole, and throw all your money down that hole". My thoughts haven't changed, actually are reinforced by your comments as that was 6 years ago. My God man, six freakin years!! That's an eternity in the CNC world.
Based on the number of laid off SB employees that have contacted me regarding possible employment opportunities in the CNC world, their statements about how many others have been laid off with them, I would assume that the buying public is no longer believing "the message".
This is sad, especially when you consider that SB once owned a MAJOR portion of the market and was in control of the message with their forum. To loose substantial percentages of market share AND a reduction of units sold in an exponentially growing market shows that the company is either not keeping abreast of the industry, has overpriced its products, or the product hasn't lived up to the marketing hype. Sadly, all 3 may true.
Isn't it true that your own (Handybot) department has constricted from an offsite 3 person operation to a corner of the main building with you as the only dedicated employee? That is not an indicator of success for the product.
My guess is that there are about 800 models of CNC machines from around 150 mfgrs (many offshore) being sold in today's market. They run on about 40 different controllers. It seems that a small minority of mfgrs build both machines AND controllers. Those "proprietary" controllers seem to be in 2 groups, one at the high end of the price and feature spectrum, the other at the low. Eliminating the high end industrial versions that often cost more than most of the machines we are most familiar with, one could surmise that the majority simply develop the products they have success with and leave the ones they don't, and I'm speaking to controllers here, to the providers with a proven track record.
Proven track record. I can speak with knowledge here. I started with SB3 in the mid 3.5.xxx's and worked, due to future implementation of the SBLink, on all of the 3.6.xx versions. All 44 of them plus an equal or greater number of beta versions. I would guess around 22 unique versions released between 2009 and late 2011. On 4/1/2013 Ted published comments regarding the end of public beta testing on the 3.8 versions and noted that 3.8.4 was "is now up and from what we can tell, reasonably stable".
That was 5 1/2 years ago. The current version is 3.8.50 according to the SB website. Lets say that only even numbers are used as release versions. That's around 23 more versions of the software. And as noted TODAY by the head of Handybot development: (you) I spend most of my time on the Handibot forum troubleshooting connection issues..."
All those versions... If I look over posts from loyal, even blindly loyal, users on your forum, the vast majority recommend the 3.6 versions over the 3.8. Five and a half years of software development and few, if any loyal users recommend it on a regular basis???