The point of your organization is teaching and education? Do you want to teach people about the way things were or about the way things will be?
Recreating 40-year-old parts is not the direction I would head if I were interested in learning and teaching. Skills like programming an N/C machine to drill PCBs is a skill set from the 1980s. No one does this today. You really should be training students for the way things will be done in the late 2020s ad early 2030s and not look back. So try a requirements-based path to getting the machines back online. Even the idea of using a PC to control a machine is "legacy engineering". Today we have cheaper and better things like microcontrollers, ASICs and FPGAs. Factories are more integrated If I were doing training today, my first step is to beg for interviews with HR people in the larger manufacturing companies (Ford, GM, Boeing,...) and ask them who they will be looking for in 5 to 6 years. Then I'd design workflows that use those skills the HR guys talked about. After early retirement I went back to grad school and studied education. I learned enough to see that we have a HUGE problem. So much of our training is wrong. Smart kids lean in spite of this but most drop out. A simple example is when they try and teach "STEM" enrichment classes to kids in middle or high schools. Stand in the back and watch what the kids are actually doing with their hands and eyes. Take notes and record data. You will find they are following instructions and using hand tools. That is not "STEM", they are training to be semi-skilled laborers, technicians at best. How to do better? It is a hard problem. I'd base the solution on building not-for-profit companies that do real work but at a net loss. On Fri, Apr 1, 2022 at 12:00 PM Dominic Francisco <df.milv...@gmail.com> wrote: > Big Howdy to the Group: > Our 501, C-19 non-profit, veteransinitiatives.org, is a small school, > composed of MilVets who have defended this priceless Nation. > Our backrouinds include : Machining, Founding, Patternmaking, > Metallurgy, Physical Chemistry, Heat Treat, Ceramics: a bunch of reprobate > motor-heads, hot-rodders & gear-heads, who remain convinced, even in our > advanced state of degradation, that we shall continue our mfg school to > place our warriors in our Nation's mfg sector. > We purchased one of these splendid, STG motion boards some years ago to > update the control of a 12klb, 1978, 4-axis Monarch VMC; worked like a > champ! > This STG board was capable of 8-Axis with a servo update time of 1 ms. > we retained the original thyristor amplifier which could output ~400 A & > 300 V on start-up. the worktable capacity was ~1600lbs! our for-profit > side regularly whittled out SAE- 4000 series steels for industry. > We sold that VMC to some DisAbled American Veterans (DAV's) we had > trained in our NP & started farming-out work to them, mostly DoD forgings & > castings. > We are now primarily a non-profit helping our warriors find meaningful > employment in our Nation to bring mfg back to the USofA. > Now we find that the STG firm went out of biz, with the un-fortunate > death of its inventor & mfg. now whattarwegonnado? > > We got us 2 plans: purchase several used STG boards to continue > teaching digital control & machine tool rebuilding to our most deserving > citizen, our DAV's. we have also interviewed some ambulatory paralyzed > veterans (PVA's) to join in. > The other crazed choice, is to start mfg the STG board from scratch. > some of our volunteers have experience in industry mfg circuit boards. we > could whittle-out frames to silk screen the traces & set up one of our > small mills to NC the holes. > We have mfg about 50 small circuit cards for the thyristor amps. these > control the beefy thyristors: zero-crossing detector, gate control, > switching, BEMF damping & small-signal routing when reversing the axis > (S-curves on start-up & when approaching the end of axis & corners). > Some of the EMC crew out there may have some suggestions on another > control board (or combination of control cards) we could mfg. > > We are committed to mfg a motion control system. just think of what our > warriors could learn in this esoteric atmosphere; consider their employment > choices! > > We hope to hear from you EMC, LINUX.org & CNC.org participants in this > technical worthy endeavor. > > > May God protect our valiant > warriors, > > don anders > patrick > callahan > giovanni > bertoni > nora o'neille > sean finnegan > > df.milv...@gmail.com > veteransinitiatives.org > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > + > > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > -- Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
