Ah-ha still alive?

This forum is dedicated to those Hobbyists Interested in CNC machining & 3D Printing in their home shops. (Digital Read Outs are also topical, as is CAD/CAM as it relates to CNC)

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Maxmachine
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Jan 17, 2003 8:54 am
Location: Oregon

Ah-ha still alive?

Post by Maxmachine »

Does anyone know the status of Ah-ha? The traffic on the Yahoo group for them has dwindled to almost zero. I keep hearing rumors that they are just about out of business.

Mark
John_Stevenson
Posts: 531
Joined: Sun Dec 22, 2002 9:51 am
Location: Nottingham, England.

Re: Ah-ha still alive?

Post by John_Stevenson »

Mark, Just my take on this.
I can't comment on the US side of things as other than Bill Griffin doing refits and someone called Darryl who was also doing refits to Boss 1's it does look dead on the surface.

In the UK a guy called Ian Eagland at Eagland Machine tools is the European agent and he's quite busy.
Only a very small portion of Ian's sales are hobby and home shop, the rest are industrial.
It's the industrail users you never hear about. They pay to have a machine retrofitted and then just use it.

Ian has done a lot of work with Ahha. He has add on boards to contol servo's, toolchangers and a full opto isolated interface board with all the power circuits also relay controlled. In the UK Ahha is being retrofitted to all sorts of machine tools, mills, lathes turret punches and even big vertical machining centres.
It's a good system and works fine. Once it's running industry isn't bothered about what it looks like, the fact it's still DOS etc.
So what many machines around them are still on Fanuc 5M's with 2 and 3 line displays.

I can see the interest by the home shop guy in a windows based controller, looks good and he can also us it for CAD/CAM and other applications.
Industry doesn't want that. They want something bombproof, tamper proof and reliable. Ahha can give this.

I have Ahha on a big Beaver mill. I also have registered copies of mach1 and the newer mach2 from Art Fenarty.
Eventually I'll use this on a small Taig mill that I'm playing with.
Will I ever swop the Beaver to mach2 ? No, because Ahha works and it does what I want. Mach2 looks pretty, has lots of buttons and flashing lights but it can't do anymore than what Ahha does at present so why have the hassle of a change over.

John S.
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