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I think swift is great as long as you are squarely in the Apple ecosystem, which was true for this use case...but the fact that they were using macs to drive ro

I think swift is great as long as you are squarely in the Apple ecosystem, which was true for this use case...but the fact that they were using macs to drive robots was curious to me. Is there some advantage in robotics to using Apple/OSX? Why not linux, BSD, or some other embeddable operating system and off-the-shelf hardware?

Axsuul 11y ago
My guess is that they run the robotics software on the same machine they do their design work.
autoreleasepool 11y ago
Just a guess, but with Apple, you trade cost-effectiveness for robustness and reliability. By using Macs as the computer and OS X as the UNIX-of-choice, they are able to eliminate entire classes of errors related to drivers, hardware-compatibility, and system configuration. Apple knows its hardware very well and OS X has (mostly) sane defaults, but I agree it is an atypical choice.
- weaksauce 11y ago
  They have two systems listed on the site and both are turnkey packages including an iMac by the looks of it. OS X is mostly nice to program for and apple makes nice hardware. I suspect they could have written the software using C# and windows with a custom PC build somewhat easily, but UNIX is a nice and stable base os so I can see why they might have chosen OS X.
daphreak 11y ago
Just guessing, but I don't think this system controls the robot with the computer. It may command it, but the closed loop control is probably not happening on the Mac. At that point your interfaces have much looser requirements. That segmentation is very similar to hobbyist 3d printers. Looking at the solutions they sell my guess is that the system is expensive enough that adding an iMac rather than some other consumer PC doesn't change cost too much. At that point they probably picked the platform they were most comfortable developing on. Going back to the first blog post shows that the author prefers Cocoa for developing GUI's and the bio states that he is CTO of the company. Again, all speculation, but thats how I'll rationalize it until he tells us different.
bsder 11y ago
> Is there some advantage in robotics to using Apple/OSX? Don't know about robotics, but OS X is architected to be able to handled real-time audio. So, I can certainly imagine (but don't explicitly know) that it has better responsiveness guarantees.
rjammala 11y ago
It is explained here: We originally built the software for these systems in a cross-platform manner, targeting Mac, Windows, and Linux using a C++ codebase. About eight years ago, we realized that as a small team we needed to focus on one platform in order to accelerate development and take on our much larger competitors. After a lengthy evaluation of the Windows, Mac, and Linux development environments, we chose the Mac and Cocoa (despite none of us having much experience with the Mac before that). We rewrote our entire control software in Cocoa seven years ago, and looking back I feel that it was one of the best decisions our company has made.
- Drdrdrq 11y ago
  "here" is here: http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2014/12/02/why-were-rewriting-our-robotics-software-swift http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2014/12/02/why-were-rewrit...

Axsuul 11y ago

My guess is that they run the robotics software on the same machine they do their design work.

autoreleasepool 11y ago

Just a guess, but with Apple, you trade cost-effectiveness for robustness and reliability. By using Macs as the computer and OS X as the UNIX-of-choice, they are able to eliminate entire classes of errors related to drivers, hardware-compatibility, and system configuration. Apple knows its hardware very well and OS X has (mostly) sane defaults, but I agree it is an atypical choice.

weaksauce 11y ago
They have two systems listed on the site and both are turnkey packages including an iMac by the looks of it. OS X is mostly nice to program for and apple makes nice hardware. I suspect they could have written the software using C# and windows with a custom PC build somewhat easily, but UNIX is a nice and stable base os so I can see why they might have chosen OS X.

daphreak 11y ago

Just guessing, but I don't think this system controls the robot with the computer. It may command it, but the closed loop control is probably not happening on the Mac. At that point your interfaces have much looser requirements. That segmentation is very similar to hobbyist 3d printers. Looking at the solutions they sell my guess is that the system is expensive enough that adding an iMac rather than some other consumer PC doesn't change cost too much. At that point they probably picked the platform they were most comfortable developing on. Going back to the first blog post shows that the author prefers Cocoa for developing GUI's and the bio states that he is CTO of the company. Again, all speculation, but thats how I'll rationalize it until he tells us different.

bsder 11y ago

> Is there some advantage in robotics to using Apple/OSX? Don't know about robotics, but OS X is architected to be able to handled real-time audio. So, I can certainly imagine (but don't explicitly know) that it has better responsiveness guarantees.

rjammala 11y ago

It is explained here: We originally built the software for these systems in a cross-platform manner, targeting Mac, Windows, and Linux using a C++ codebase. About eight years ago, we realized that as a small team we needed to focus on one platform in order to accelerate development and take on our much larger competitors. After a lengthy evaluation of the Windows, Mac, and Linux development environments, we chose the Mac and Cocoa (despite none of us having much experience with the Mac before that). We rewrote our entire control software in Cocoa seven years ago, and looking back I feel that it was one of the best decisions our company has made.

Drdrdrq 11y ago
"here" is here: http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2014/12/02/why-were-rewriting-our-robotics-software-swift http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2014/12/02/why-were-rewrit...