blog/data/2024-07-10-linuxcnc-gathering.txt

   1 Title: Some notes from the 2024 LinuxCNC Norwegian developer gathering
   2 Tags: english, debian, linuxcnc
   3 Date: 2024-07-10 14:45
   4
   5 <p>The Norwegian <a href="https://linuxcnc.org/">The LinuxCNC</a>
   6 developer gathering 2024 is over.  It was a great and productive
   7 weekend, and I am sad that it is over.</p>
   8
   9 <p>Regular readers probably still remember what LinuxCNC is, but her
  10 is a quick summary for those that forgot?  LinuxCNC is a free software
  11 system for numerical control of machines such as milling machines,
  12 lathes, plasma cutters, routers, cutting machines, robots and
  13 hexapods.  It eats G-code and produce motor movement and other changes
  14 to the physical world, while reading sensor input.</p>
  15
  16 <p>I am not quite sure about the total head count, as not all people
  17 were present at the gathering the entire weekend, but I believe it was
  18 close to 10 people showing their faces at the gathering.  The "hard
  19 core" of the group, who stayed the entire weekend, were two from
  20 Norway, two from Germany and one from England.  I am happy with the
  21 outcome from the gathering.  We managed to wrap up a new stable
  22 LinuxCNC release 2.9.3 and even tested it on real hardware within
  23 minutes of the release.  The release notes for 2.9.3 are still being
  24 written, but should show up on on the project site in the next few
  25 days.  We managed to go through around twenty pull requests and merge
  26 then into either the stable release (2.9) or the development branch
  27 (master).  There are still around thirty pull requests left to
  28 process, so we are not out of work yet.  We even managed to
  29 fix/improve a slightly worn lathe, and experiment with running a
  30 mechanical clock using G-code.</p>
  31
  32 <p>The evening barbeque worked well both on Saturday and Sunday.  It
  33 is quite fun to light up a charcoal grill using compressed air.  Sadly
  34 the weather was not the best, so we stayed indoors most of the
  35 time.</p>
  36
  37 <p>This gathering was made possible partly with sponsoring from both
  38 <a href="https://www.redpill-linpro.com/">Redpill Linpro</a>,
  39 <a href="https://debian.org/">Debian</a> and
  40 <a href="https://nuugfoundation.no/">NUUG Foundation</a>, and we are
  41 most grateful for the support.  I would also like to thank the local
  42 school for lending us some furniture, and of course the rest of the
  43 members of the organizers team, Asle and Bosse, for their countless
  44 contributions.  The gathering was such success that we want to do it
  45 again next year.</p>
  46
  47 <p>We plan to organize the next Norwegian LinuxCNC developer gathering
  48 at the end of June next year, the weekend Friday 27th to Sunday 29th
  49 of June 2025.  I recommend you reserve the dates on your calendar
  50 today.  Other related communities are also welcome to join in, for
  51 example those working on systems like FreeCAD and opencamlib, as I am
  52 sure we have much in common and sharing experiences would be very
  53 useful to all involved.  We are of course looking for sponsors for
  54 this gathering already.  The total budget for this gathering was
  55 around NOK 25.000 (around EUR 2.300), so our needs are quite modest.
  56 Perhaps a machine or tools company would like to help out the free
  57 software manufacturing community by sponsoring food, lodging and
  58 transport for such gathering?</p>