Jacques Mattheij (#jacquesm) did a #CNC #manufacturing startup in the 80s which used stepper motors instead of servos, which turned it into “the startup from hell”. “These people knew their stuff and when they found out that our machine was using steppers, not servos they were immediately skeptical. Rightly so. Step-loss, the situation where you have told a stepper to make a move but it hasn’t had been observed before but not on the scale that we’re talking about here. (...) At Fred’s house things were not all that rosy either, his wife tried to torch their boat, and nearly succeeded. Round about this time my wife left me, and she was completely right about doing so. I’d been working day and night for almost as long as we’d been together by then thinking that I might get us out of the financial hole we were in if only I worked just a bit harder. (...) They ended up ditching the ST (good for them) dropped the steppers in favor of servos and rebuilt the whole thing on the PC, the software that I wrote was translated line-by-line to give them their first version which formed the basis of the stuff they still sell to this day.
Years later Fred showed up at my offices in IJmuiden to ask if I felt like doing it all again, from a copy of the software that he’d kept after selling the company.
I declined the offer, he also confessed that he’d torched that factory so I threw him out.”
on 02025-07-23One of #jacquesm’s photos of his #CNC windmill #plasma-cutting machine from 2008
on 02016-10-14#jacquesm’s critique of Google’s #Makani wind #energy harvesting project.
on 02015-12-03Jacques Mattheij (#jacquesm) on the end of internet freedom #humanrights
on 02015-08-05