Hi my name is Steve Ryan
I'm a disabled auto mechanic with way too much time to think.
After years owning my own business and seeing the cost of equipment rise, labor rise, the need to do more with less the only way to survive.
I see waste and counter productivity everywhere.
Would you shove a 20 foot long one foot square piece of material in the door of a machining center to make 4 inch doodads.
No you would saw the material first.
The plastic injection molding business down the street from me has 15 machining centers making any kind of plastic doodad you wish to purchase the mold to make from fishing lures to cooking pot handles.
The cost is not in plastic, It is in the making of the mold. And the customer has to pay for that first. How do you compete with country's that will subsidize their manufactures cost and include the mold if you let them manufacture the product with employees that cannot spell cnc.
Here is how I would attack that issue. I have to have that machining center to be precision, but I certainly don't need 15 of them turning chunks of material into parts.
I'd purchase 20 zx45 type mills and cnc convert all of them for less than one machining center. They would be the band saws of my shop. ripping away the material that is in the way of my machining center creating a precision part.
The zx45's are throw a ways doing 95 percent of the work and in a few hours can be replaced for $2400.00 dollars.
Unbolt the retrofit and slide a new machine under it. sell it before it's worn out to a hobbyist.
A few fixtures to maintain precision and your banging out way more molds and competitive.
Now you buy another machining center and 20 more zx45s and your somebody who is making the guy down the street from me look silly for wasting all of his money making a machining center company rich. And Call their service when it stops...
Ya I know Imagine NASA's shock when they located in the south with hillbillies like me.
So enough with the rant here is the idea for more cnc machine for less. I'll use my new Centroid Acorn retrofit for example.
https://centroidcncforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=3068
https://centroidcncforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=3464
I have built a few machines and have used a few different controller cards, breakout boards and usb parallel port emulators.
Mach3 on a lathe is a bit fussy for the threading say the least so I went with Acorn. My Gosh the heavens opened up a real spindle encoder 8000 pulses per revolution, closed loop steppers with way more power, flood coolant automatic tool measurement. lights bells whistles then a tool turret....ohhhhh
woops, I'm out of inputs and outputs. 8 of each. Plan B I'm going to make the tool changer work and work right with what I have. but what about an air chuck, bar feeder,
probe to check part before cutoff hell i wanted this thing to make me coffee. Disney is located in Florida too.
So I know I'm at this boards limits and ya they are coming out with an add on I/O board but is there another way.
Well acorn owns my pc when running and its caput for more options so how do you get more things done? Acorn can't do more but it has one feature in code that is the answer. Acorn can turn on an output from a program..ya I know duuuhhhh Acorn can use dwell on an output. turn on output one for 20 seconds etc.
But can acorn call another program with an entire new set of motors and I/O to run a sub program. no not by itself you buy the bigger card if you want the real lathe.
I'm cheap and as I said I have nothing to do all day but drink coffee and think.
Ok get ready to laugh because you have seen these little attempts at cnc with these but the answer is Arduino
Arduino has I/O and the ability to run small programs. turn things off and on (watch the videos these guys love to play with led's . 2 hours of programing and $25 in electronics to do something you could do with a AA battery)
Here is how this works Acorn won't talk to an Arduino in a conventional way. usb what ever it is not built into Acorn, but acorn will pulse an output with dwell
daaaaaaash dot dot dot dot daaaaaaaash. Arduino is listening and hears a dash longer than one second that means a request is coming in. 4 dots then a long dash. longer than a second again that ends the request
That's a 4 and request 4 means output pin 13 relay.
Pin 13 relay is connected to an old pc running mach3 or any other program that can use remote control buttons. pin 13 activates a remote cycle start for the mach3 program that now has a entire new set of things to do to complete your process.
mach3 is done and rewinds it's code but just before ending it outputs a signal that acorn receives on an input, time to go back to work acorn.
acorn outputs dash dot dot dot dash. Hay wake up Arduino, that's a tool change code. Arduino sends back ok to input
arduino knows this is a tool change so it waits for the number, 5 dots or pulses you get it tool 5.
Arduino starts dc motor turning turret watching pulses pass position 1 or from last location until it stops at 5, locks turret and sends output to Acorn ok go back to work
There is so much more this can do if you see the logic behind what I am saying. chuck locks bar feeders tail stocks and all with simple code moving in micro seconds.
add another board,use your imagination.
That old machine that seemed way to expensive to retrofit or repair should look a lot different now.
These cnc controllers and tiny micro controllers have no idea how big a machine they are running. they just send out tiny little 3.3 or 5v signals and could be running a freight train.
Steve