Kurt Jacobson
2017-06-16 04:50:44 UTC
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:
Following a scanned template:
Scanning a template:
Chuck self centering small diameter:
TubeNotch MATLAB program:
https://github.com/KurtJacobson/TubeNotch
Regards,
Kurt
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:
Following a scanned template:
Scanning a template:
Chuck self centering small diameter:
TubeNotch MATLAB program:
https://github.com/KurtJacobson/TubeNotch
Regards,
Kurt