Eh, as a controls engineer, I get a bit of Gell-Mann amnesia watching his content on drives and motors. There's a complete lack of tuning described in the video, it seems a lot of his performance complaints are due to conservative out-of-the box defaults.
The stuff he builds very cheaply with little more than some wood, Python, and Raspberry Pis is impressive, and he deserves all the kudos for building cool shit and putting it on the Internet (I'm just a consumer and critic, not a creator in comparison). But serial control from an interpreted script instead of CAN/Ethercat messaging from a motion controller or PLC is not the way these products are typically used in industry, and most people don't run the defaults.
There's definitely a niche for hobbyist-grade, student-grade, or lab-grade motion products that name brands like Beckhoff, Omron, Fanuc, Rockwell, and Siemens largely ignore. You could get 4 axes from DMM for the price of 1 from most of those vendors. And while simple serial commands can make interesting things happen with the DMM unit, you'd have to scale a daunting cliff of a learning curve just to get a motion axis initialized in their massive, standardized, proprietary, legacy ecosystems.
Again, no disrespect intended: I've invested thousands of hours into building custom, multi-million-dollar machine tools at my day job and instead of challenging myself, going to the workshop and turning on a camera when I get home, I've vegetated on the couch, entertained, and sometimes educated by his content building a milling machine or lathe out of wood. But this "servos vs. steppers" debate really only applies to low-cost, simple, hobbyist-grade equipment, and isn't such a big topic in the industrial space.
> I've invested thousands of hours into building custom, multi-million-dollar machine tools at my day job
One key is find a hobby that is enough different from your day job you are not burned out of doing it. I can write code at home and sometimes I do - but most of the time I'm burned out after doing that for my day job. However I can still bend the sides of a ukulele, use CAD to design a new switch housing for some manual machine, practice trumpet, or other such tasks that are not related to my day job. I personally am not interested in editing a video (which takes a lot of time to do well) so you won't see me on youtube, that too is something I could do if I was interested in it.
Though with kids often all I have time for is cooking a meal before getting them to bed and then I'm off to bed myself. I wouldn't trade it for the world, but there is limited time and so there are a lot of things I want to do that I don't have time to do.
> But this "servos vs. steppers" debate really only applies to low-cost, simple, hobbyist-grade equipment, and isn't such a big topic in the industrial space.
I assume these videos are targeted at hobbyists… I can’t imagine people in your position using him as a source of knowledge.
Please re-watch the video, but THIS TIME PAY ATTENTION. I do talk about the motion parameters, even show the code on the screen briefly. I even show the effects of changing the parameters.
Yeah. The first (and only, so far) time I came up against a servo controller from AMC (https://www.a-m-c.com/) my initial thought was "why the hell is this so difficult?" Sure, the product manual has everything you need to know about how to program the device. But that manual is also practically unreadable unless you already know how to program the device
Contrast with Teknic where I could get the servo drive up and running in a few hours because of an actually readable product manual and plenty of sample code and a Windows DLL to make everything easy.
There's definitely opportunity at the lower end of the market.
Yeah Matthias is fun to watch because he does a lot of hack stuff with plywood that works better than you'd expect. He does a lot of stuff with a lot of confidence, a lot of it dangerous. He's a smart guy for sure, so for what the setups are, the data is interesting. However, the problem is that people extrapolate beyond the setup. It's rare that the way he does something is a _good_ way to do something. He doesn't demonstrate himself to be an expert in much beyond software and hacking stuff together with wood, and I don't think he claims much beyond that.
His breadth of knowledge constantly amazes me
Eh, as a controls engineer, I get a bit of Gell-Mann amnesia watching his content on drives and motors. There's a complete lack of tuning described in the video, it seems a lot of his performance complaints are due to conservative out-of-the box defaults.
The stuff he builds very cheaply with little more than some wood, Python, and Raspberry Pis is impressive, and he deserves all the kudos for building cool shit and putting it on the Internet (I'm just a consumer and critic, not a creator in comparison). But serial control from an interpreted script instead of CAN/Ethercat messaging from a motion controller or PLC is not the way these products are typically used in industry, and most people don't run the defaults.
There's definitely a niche for hobbyist-grade, student-grade, or lab-grade motion products that name brands like Beckhoff, Omron, Fanuc, Rockwell, and Siemens largely ignore. You could get 4 axes from DMM for the price of 1 from most of those vendors. And while simple serial commands can make interesting things happen with the DMM unit, you'd have to scale a daunting cliff of a learning curve just to get a motion axis initialized in their massive, standardized, proprietary, legacy ecosystems.
Again, no disrespect intended: I've invested thousands of hours into building custom, multi-million-dollar machine tools at my day job and instead of challenging myself, going to the workshop and turning on a camera when I get home, I've vegetated on the couch, entertained, and sometimes educated by his content building a milling machine or lathe out of wood. But this "servos vs. steppers" debate really only applies to low-cost, simple, hobbyist-grade equipment, and isn't such a big topic in the industrial space.
> I've invested thousands of hours into building custom, multi-million-dollar machine tools at my day job
One key is find a hobby that is enough different from your day job you are not burned out of doing it. I can write code at home and sometimes I do - but most of the time I'm burned out after doing that for my day job. However I can still bend the sides of a ukulele, use CAD to design a new switch housing for some manual machine, practice trumpet, or other such tasks that are not related to my day job. I personally am not interested in editing a video (which takes a lot of time to do well) so you won't see me on youtube, that too is something I could do if I was interested in it.
Though with kids often all I have time for is cooking a meal before getting them to bed and then I'm off to bed myself. I wouldn't trade it for the world, but there is limited time and so there are a lot of things I want to do that I don't have time to do.
> But this "servos vs. steppers" debate really only applies to low-cost, simple, hobbyist-grade equipment, and isn't such a big topic in the industrial space.
I assume these videos are targeted at hobbyists… I can’t imagine people in your position using him as a source of knowledge.
Please re-watch the video, but THIS TIME PAY ATTENTION. I do talk about the motion parameters, even show the code on the screen briefly. I even show the effects of changing the parameters.
Sure this criticism is totally fair, and I suspected as much (as a non controls engineer), but that's also why I said breadth and not depth :)
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Yeah. The first (and only, so far) time I came up against a servo controller from AMC (https://www.a-m-c.com/) my initial thought was "why the hell is this so difficult?" Sure, the product manual has everything you need to know about how to program the device. But that manual is also practically unreadable unless you already know how to program the device
Contrast with Teknic where I could get the servo drive up and running in a few hours because of an actually readable product manual and plenty of sample code and a Windows DLL to make everything easy.
There's definitely opportunity at the lower end of the market.
Yeah Matthias is fun to watch because he does a lot of hack stuff with plywood that works better than you'd expect. He does a lot of stuff with a lot of confidence, a lot of it dangerous. He's a smart guy for sure, so for what the setups are, the data is interesting. However, the problem is that people extrapolate beyond the setup. It's rare that the way he does something is a _good_ way to do something. He doesn't demonstrate himself to be an expert in much beyond software and hacking stuff together with wood, and I don't think he claims much beyond that.
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The guy who fell for the most basic boomer Phishing mail - two times in quick succession
Yeah, clearly tech people never get their Youtube hacked: https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23654996/linus-tech-tips-...
Linus isn't really a tech guy, at least not software.