Hello all, Some of the videos linked in the "LCNC TED Talk style" thread reminded me of a CNC plasma tubing notcher I designed and built a few years ago while I was in school. I think some of you might be interested.
As built the notcher has a capacity of 4". It consists of a rotating pneumatically actuated chuck and a horizontal linear axis that moves the torch to and fro along the axis of the tube. The fab shop I designed the notcher for usually had the client provide them with CAD generated templates, so one of the goals of the project was to be able to scan in these templates and generate G-code so multiple notches could be cut. I used a simple probing sub and a fiber optic sensor in place of the plasma tourch to scan a template warped around a tube. This was slow but worked well and was reliable. For cases were a template was not provided I wrote a small MATLAB program and GUI to generate the g-code given the joint parameters. I initially used Mach3 for the control, but then I switched to GRBL with a custom interface so they would not have to keep a Win XP PC with parport around just to run the notcher. What I would love to do is rework it to have LinuxCNC on a BB or RPi on board with a small touch screen. It would be fairly easy to write a custom interface so machine control, template scanning and G-code generation could all be done from one interface. A google photo album of the notcher build: https://goo.gl/photos/RcgPV2fRfD5ChmQ39 Early video of notcher in action: https://youtu.be/uZP3JNNKDLQ Following a scanned template: https://youtu.be/DsCuw9TPBeY Scanning a template: https://youtu.be/QfmZeYXlU6E Chuck self centering small diameter: https://youtu.be/5S8kO3-p4vs TubeNotch MATLAB program: https://github.com/KurtJacobson/TubeNotch Regards, Kurt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
