4 ms·
CAM can take a lot of time and need considerable computing resources. Not that much of issue today, but still, why do the same computations over and over again?
by rmu09 8y ago
CAM can take a lot of time and need considerable computing resources. Not that much of issue today, but still, why do the same computations over and over again? Also, you will want to inspect the toolpaths before running them on real hardware.
- juliangoldsmith 8y agoYeah, you'd still definitely want to look at the toolpaths. As far as recalculating everything, it could still calculate most of it ahead of time. What I'm thinking of is something like a CAM workspace in FreeCAD. That is, something like would let you take your model, generate and inspect a toolpath (or flip through possible toolpaths), and produce a part. The CAM software would get feedback from the controller, so it could follow what was going on. It might also be possible to make adjustments, or pause the run, based on sensors. For instance, if you could detect chatter, you could slow down the feed rate; if you could detect a broken tool, you could pause the run and ping the operator.
- rmu09 8y agoIt should not be that hard to export current axis positions and get it into FreeCAD. Look at machinekit, they have remote control and toolpath display. Pause/run/start, override of feed and spindle speeds also is easy. Detecting chatter is not that easy. Slowing down may be wrong, sometimes it is better to speed up. Doing on-the-fly adjustments of toolpaths in CAM integrated into a machine control would be a major research project.
- DannyBee 8y ago"Detecting chatter is not that easy. Slowing down may be wrong, sometimes it is better to speed up." Errr? Detecting chatter is easy, and in fact, the latest spindles output the current tool vibration rate over your choice of fieldbus. That's fairly basic, much more advanced things are done. "Doing on-the-fly adjustments of toolpaths in CAM integrated into a machine control would be a major research project." Why? Toolpaths are already adjusted on the fly. Integrating CAM does not make this particularly harder - any of these machines have hardware motion planning anyway. Adding another FPGA or two to accelerate 5 axis movement calculation would not materially change their cost.