My Cable Robot CNC Foam Cutter is running!
- dave.franchino@gmail.com
- Offline
- New Member
Less
More
- Posts: 14
- Thank you received: 5
09 Oct 2024 01:04 #311619
by dave.franchino@gmail.com
Hey kind folks,
I thought I’d share a quick video showing the status of our Linux CNC foam-cutter project. I’m brand new to LinuxCNC and basically just took this on as a fun project to learn a bit.
photos.app.goo.gl/ksw5mnEoJEibSiqs5
The drive drums are custom designed 3D printed hypocycloidal drives running a pair of cables to a hot wire knife. The 3D printed drives are a bit janky but actually work surprisingly well. Not sure how durable they’d be in the long term.
While this test-bed is quite small, the objective is to be able to mount the drum modules on a wall some 12 feet apart and in doing so be able to cut shapes out of large foam sheets. The objective is to be able to build an ultra-low cost CNC foam cutter for less than $200. I could then manually stack the cut sheets together like a loaf of bread and build very large 3D printed objects ala a huge FDM (albiet with 2” thick layers).
Given the lower speed we’re running the unit on a Raspberry Pi. I’m sure the latency is a mess but it appears to be tracking. The forward and inverse kinematics functions were the majority of the challenge - I made life much more difficult by running the cables tangential to the drums instead of through a fixed ferrule but I was eventually able to solve the kinematics. The inverse kinematics were just trig but the forward kinematics required numerical methods (Newton-Raphson) which I only sort of understand but seem to work.
More to come to make this more useful. If there is any interest I’ll likely open-source the whole thing when it’s a bit more stable and refined.
Thanks to all of you who helped on here through my rough patches.
I thought I’d share a quick video showing the status of our Linux CNC foam-cutter project. I’m brand new to LinuxCNC and basically just took this on as a fun project to learn a bit.
photos.app.goo.gl/ksw5mnEoJEibSiqs5
The drive drums are custom designed 3D printed hypocycloidal drives running a pair of cables to a hot wire knife. The 3D printed drives are a bit janky but actually work surprisingly well. Not sure how durable they’d be in the long term.
While this test-bed is quite small, the objective is to be able to mount the drum modules on a wall some 12 feet apart and in doing so be able to cut shapes out of large foam sheets. The objective is to be able to build an ultra-low cost CNC foam cutter for less than $200. I could then manually stack the cut sheets together like a loaf of bread and build very large 3D printed objects ala a huge FDM (albiet with 2” thick layers).
Given the lower speed we’re running the unit on a Raspberry Pi. I’m sure the latency is a mess but it appears to be tracking. The forward and inverse kinematics functions were the majority of the challenge - I made life much more difficult by running the cables tangential to the drums instead of through a fixed ferrule but I was eventually able to solve the kinematics. The inverse kinematics were just trig but the forward kinematics required numerical methods (Newton-Raphson) which I only sort of understand but seem to work.
More to come to make this more useful. If there is any interest I’ll likely open-source the whole thing when it’s a bit more stable and refined.
Thanks to all of you who helped on here through my rough patches.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
- OttoDidact
- Offline
- Junior Member
Less
More
- Posts: 23
- Thank you received: 3
10 Oct 2024 06:04 #311697
by OttoDidact
Replied by OttoDidact on topic My Cable Robot CNC Foam Cutter is running!
Very cool.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
Time to create page: 0.081 seconds