Re: 4-AXIS FOAM CUTTER

Hi All

regarding this software - not a trivial task as I well know :-) At the hobby
level there is nothing that will do what you ask apart from the excellent
foam wing cutting software from Gilles Muller & friends. Even at the semi
commercial end, there seems to be zilch apart from the Austrian Step-Four
system software which only runs on their hardware (stepper interface has a
PIC processor - the s/w looks for it :-) The main problem lies in ensuring
that both ends of the cutter track proportionately with appropriate
"waypoints" along the cut (assuming that we don't have the same profile at
each end - in which case it is extremely simple of course :-)

However, all is not lost. I wrote a piece of Mac software a couple of years
ago that does exactly this - imports a shape (can be totally different - say
a circle and a square - a cat and a camel ;-) for each end of the foam. The
wire attach points can also be anywhere outwith the foam block too. Press a
button, it calculates the wirepath, press another button and it outputs it
to the hardware.
The hardware consists of a PIC processor driving a normal stepper driver (in
this case simple UCN5804's) - the interface to the Mac being serial - no
parallel ports unfortunately :-( 4 Steppers in all - hardware is up to the
individual - ideas can be gleaned from the French CNCnet site. I have a very
simple system currently in development using toothed belt drives.
You can see a screenshot of the software at my website.

BTW, it is NOT available for the PC (at least not yet anyway =8-)

Cheers

Neil

___________________________________________________________________________

Neil D. Gillies Tel: +44 (0)1383-823489
SeaGull Technologies Fax: +44 (0)870-0543622
11 River View Mobile: +44 (0)771-4330793
Dalgety Bay, Fife neil@...
Scotland KY11 9YE http://www.sea-gull.demon.co.uk