Hallo, good people,
I see that I have started yet another religious war! (sigh)
So now the first principle, I would think we all agree on, is that where
you STAND determines what you SEE.
I have no doubt that the people who commented here are quite genuine in
what they perceive to be reality.
But at the same time, if you move over a bit you might see quite different
things happening.
So here is my comment on your observations:
Stuart -
> STEP is better than IGES. STEP has not arrived at perfection, YET.
No and it will not either for some time to come.
BUT Boeing keeps pushing for some solution, already for all these years,
AND is prepared to throw money at it
And this latest trick is a clever one: get as many universities involved as
possible.
(Mickeysoft is on the same trail by the way, already for years!)
Some time or the other the penny will drop with some of these bright young
kids and something good will come of it.
And the other trick: make it open source. That community is much more open
to new ideas than the big
software houses. They will pick up afterwards, whatever becomes profitable
and polish it.
Now in my experience clever deep pockets will always win out over poor me
sitting here preaching my belief.
Peter -
> Actually I rather doubt this. Can you explain why this would be?
You are quite correct in your observation about latency. But unfortunately
there are many more factors that determine
what is experienced in practice by an engineer trying to set up a new drive
system or trying to troubleshoot a misbehaving
system. The whole science of (analog) signal transmission, which involves
noise, cable impedance, filtering and what not, is for
most young engineers very much a black art. So the result were many lousy
systems, which never got fixed properly
because good field service engineers have always been few and far
inbetween.
So along came digital, al pre-configured by the manufacturer and lo and
behold everything became plug and play (eh well, almost!)
"The computer just tells you what to do" thats what I get here (South
Africa) from service technicians.
And on a high speed machine the newer drive systems are genuinely much
better because the motors are much faster and
it is possible to delegate lots of stuff to the drive, including the
closure of the position loop. At the same time the application software
and the electrical cabinet are very much simpler than in the olden days.
I just brought a 9 axes system back up, that had some digital loop problem
that was unsolvable for many months.
In any case, I would not dream to do a system like that with analog
technology. The risks are much too big. One sloppy drive
and the whole Glockenspiel would collapse with accompanying noises of
broken toys.
Some of you might remember, when I first got to know LCNC, that I was after
a 5 axis mill retrofit. Which I did not get!
Not because LCNC was not capable!
But because customer got pig ears sown on about what the computer all does
for you!!! And so aquired himself a grossly inferior
system and had massive mechanical damage done to his machine in the
process.
All because I was in no position to pull of the same smoke and mirror
display my competitor did.
So here again: I might insist that the earth is flat and all this bull
about a round earth is made up in Hollywood, because
after all that is what I see every day. . . Yet it does not go down with
quite a few other people, because their vantage point is different.
AND unfortunately they have money!!!
So I would yet say that some fun is to be had and perhaps some money is to
be made if we get up and at least are seen to cooperate
with this initiative, after all the deep thinking will presumably be done
by Fabian and his friends.
Besides that, one or two modern drive interfaces WILL benefit the project
and us. And will not steal bread out of Peter's or Jon's mouth
because they operate in a totally different market! A sercos drive will in
general be rather expensive in that market.
Ok nuff said. Time to listen to music now.
Cheers,
j.
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:18 PM, Kirk Wallace
<kwall...@wallacecompany.com>wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-03-29 at 08:15 -0500, Stuart Stevenson wrote:
> > Gentlemen,
> > I have seen this project for over two decades. It WAS the next
> > 'greatest' answer to part production. This 'answer' was initiated in
> > the late 1970's.
> > Iges was going to be the main tool to machine parts directly from
> > geometry ie (no programmer).
> ... snip
> > We have not arrived at the point of removing the programmer.
> > thanks
> > Stuart
>
> While going through the Steptools documents I had the impression that
> the CAD person would design the shape, specify the material, all of the
> processes, tooling, consumables, fixtures, and everything else including
> the process of recycling or disposal of the part. All of this would be
> contained in one big part database, from which all processes would pull
> their bit. It seems likely that mistakes would be made or changes needed
> and would be very hard to correct because the data is so interconnected.
> A correction would be made but other parts of the database could see it
> as a mistake and correct it back, or trigger whole new mistakes. Kind of
> sounds like Windows or Xorg.
>
> Another concern is that the CNC controller would not only need to deal
> with a raft of new responsibilities, but also be prepared to deal with
> all of the new possibilities whether they apply or not, making the
> required code orders of magnitude more complex.
>
> If the major manufacturers, NIST and ISO see this as the next great
> thing, there must be something to it. I'm not seeing yet, but still
> keeping an eye on it.
> --
> Kirk Wallace
> http://www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/
> http://www.wallacecompany.com/E45/index.html
> California, USA
>
>
>
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