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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Mitey Machine Control
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| PhenixRising Guru  Joined: 07/11/2023 Location: United KingdomPosts: 2100 |
My sales manager has been bugging me for a bit of promotion material for my new controller. The problem is matherp keeps shifting my goal posts 🤣😂 So anyway, to shut him up, I half heartedly threw a few key points to Gemini and let it do its thing. Wow, I'm blown away 😁 Marketing.pdf |
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Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 9234 |
IMHO it needs a little editing regarding page layout, but otherwise - where do I buy one? ;) Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini |
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Volhout Guru Joined: 05/03/2018 Location: NetherlandsPosts: 6195 |
Phoenix, The obsolecense item may be hard to prove. What if you yourself retire? Typically that is where big firms excell. Another thing to think about is the claim that companies can maintain their OWN systems. Do they have the knowledge? And what if the system works as promised for 10 years without any fault? Do they still have the knowledge in 10 years? Volhout PicomiteVGA PETSCII ROBOTS |
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| PhenixRising Guru Joined: 07/11/2023 Location: United KingdomPosts: 2100 |
Hi harm, This is the whole point. Geoff and Pete gave us open soucrce I'm doing the same thing. Not dependent on a company or individual. Anyone SHOULD be able to resolve any problem. I served my time building control panels (relays, contactors) and a schematic was shipped. Any competent electrician could maintain this controller. Then along came PLCs and manufacturers realized that they could screw their customers (argue all you want, I was there). My goal is to provide a realistic alternative to today's brainwashed bullsh*t. Challenge: Find on YouTube, an example of dual-loop servo control, trajectory profiling, linear/circular interpolation (s-curve and trapezoidal), electronic gearing with any number of masters and any number of slaves. You ain't gonna find it....so why not. Yeah we can find endless info about Mickey Mouse stepper garbage, but nothing about the serious stuff. I realize that I am the only member of this community who deals with this stuff but matherp has created something that goes WAY beyond retro gaming. Hang out at PLCTALK.NET for a minute and see how deep the bullsh*t gets. "But it's only company money so it's..... different". |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 9234 |
I've seen the result of a PLC family going out of date too (Siemens S5 springs to mind). Support tends to fall away pretty quickly and the cost of spares goes through the ceiling (for the short time they are still around) as the big companies buy up all the remaining stock. After that you pay high prices on ebay for modules that have been stripped out of a system. Very few people attempt to repair them as there is little or no information available and many use custom silicon. The problem isn't that much different here. Ultimately everything depends on a platform for MMBasic remaining available. Even if support for MMBasic itself was lost, the hardware to run it on is more important. Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini |
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| Volhout Guru Joined: 05/03/2018 Location: NetherlandsPosts: 6195 |
Phenix, Got the point. Maybe you could make the marketing add simpler. - Don't wait for support, you can do it yourself - Don't pay $$$$$ But even when the internet remains available and you can download everything from Geoff.net - or local backup - there may not be a Peter or Geoff 10 years from now to port MMBasic to the STM33fixion chip (RP2040 will have been out of production for 5 years by then, RP2350 is superceeded by RP2750 (dual Arm M7)) -or- RP seized to exist. That is the issue. The MMBasic code can be transparent, and maintainable. But the hardware may become unavailable. And that is where big companies shine (as I said before). They have leverage (or capital for "last time buy") to keep chips in production longer than silicon vendors plan. Or have a team to port the OS to new chips. And this accounts for all parts in the system (I know...this is my job !! Keeping designs in production for longer than 10 years is a real task!!). Not all parts are Z80 CPU's, 555 timers, 0.25W E12 resistors that have been unaltered in 40 years. I think your biggest challenge will be to solve exactly that puzzle. Not rolling out the systems. You can do that, for sure. But ensuring the new system is a good long term investment. Solve that puzzle (and show the solution in your marketing flyer). A simple solution can be that you mark up every system you sell with 20-30%, and for that money create spare parts stock AT THE CUSTOMER. That can be boards, system modules, whatever. They can swap parts (first line of service) and you can use this de-centralized stock also (repair boards). Volhout Edited 2026-10-23 17:10 by Volhout PicomiteVGA PETSCII ROBOTS |
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| pointy56 Newbie  Joined: 31/05/2025 Location: United KingdomPosts: 3 |
Here are the availability dates given by Raspberry Pi: We expect RP2040 to remain in production until at least January 2041. RP2350 will remain in production until at least January 2045. Wouldn't that satisfy most customers? Martin |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 9234 |
When I was designing control panels we reckoned that a good target was 10 years for stuff containing any electronics more complicated than timers. Many customers with complex needs will have changed or updated things before that time, those that haven't will usually be using relatively simple technology, which we could usually estimate a 20 year life for. The "intelligent relay" type of PLCs contain a lithium battery (often a tagged CR2032 soldered in) to maintain the clock and, in some cases, battery backed RAM. That will have a shelf life of 10 years from manufacture, after which time the user has to at least reset the clock after a power outage (if he's lucky - early models had the user program in battery maintained CMOS RAM). We regarded such PLCs as disposable items and sometimes supplied a program listing and instruction book. We also kept a copy of the program electronically in the job file (you can't trust customers to be able to find the documentation etc. that you provide). Of course, all that was a futile effort as the company I worked for no longer exists. Things have accelerated and even the relay/timer/contactor stuff can be mostly electronic now. It's made stuff more compact and, in some ways. made it more reliable. It's not necessarily increased its life span though. I've worked on panels with relays and contactors that have been run for 40 years, no-one has run the same PLC continuously for that long AFAIK. :) Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini |
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