On the Artsoft forum a member called Zarzul is making a nice anodized mount for a web cam to be used as an optical edge finder.
He is selling them together with the web cam. They look good.
http://www.artsoftcontrols.com/forum...p?topic=2519.0
Anyhow this caught my attention. This could be very handy.
I often spend quite some time accurately lining the spindle of my X3 with an edge or centre mark on a job.
Mach has a facility built in to view a video window which has cross hairs for accurately aligning with a feature.
Searching this forum there are some posts about this but not many. This suggests to me that not many people are using this feature.
Being the sort that like to have a fiddle I thought I'll have a go at this.
Though Zarzul's offering is great, me being on the other side of the world and our local dollar falling I decided it would be more sensible for me to make my own.
So off down to the local market and grabbed the most basic spec'd web cam I could find. $15
Got it home and made up a mount to suit and gave it a try.
Well it took a bit of fiddling to get it adjusted to read spot on centre but once I got that right it works like a champ.
I use the small plastic lens cap as a slip gauge to set the lens height consistently above the job, which is about 4mm.
Had to screw the lens out a fair way to get good focus this close.
The lens was a little wonky in the thread ($15 remember) so when set, I hot melt glued it. Now it is rigid.
Mach has a wizard written by German Bravo to find the centre of a hole by entering any three points.
This works really well with the camera. Edges and centre marks are easy to align.
So all up I am very pleased with this. It is a very simple to make and inexpensive.
If you have got a mill and use Mach then give it a go. Or buy one of Zarzul's
Greg
PS, the pic shows a rule with 0.5mm graduations.