Maker Project LabMaker Project Lab: This week on Maker Update, a giant AT-AT made from foam board, the Goliath CNC robot, embossing your notebook, affordable addressable LED strip, a software update for your knitting machine, and World Maker Faire. This week’s Cool Tool is WS2812b LED strip.
3 comments:
There is a lot to discuss from this video, but I am just going to talk about that router. It is quite similar and quite different from the Shaper Origin. Similar in that it is a CNC router without the table and gantry, different in that it is an autonomous robot and not human controlled. It is hard to tell from this video quite how it works, but after a little more research I found that it is a robot that rolls around the sheet good and gets its position tracking through wireless string encoders (sounds like an oxymoron, the data is wireless, the string is not) that sit on the corners of the sheet. The robot is a perfect balance (according to the creator) of router torque, weight, friction and drive power. Disregarding the price, I think this is a much better option for home CNC routers than a gantry system or the Origin because it is limitless (potentially) and does not rely on human precision.
Ok I definitely thought this article was only about the ATAT shown in the thumbnail picture, which was super cool in itself that they made such an amazing and huge replica from the base instructions of a desktop toy, but then he started talking about this CNC robot guy that you just put on a sheet of material and it’s a CNC router that just rolls around. This could be an extremely revolutionary tool for smaller shops that can’t afford the money or space to house a full size router (we don’t know how expensive yet, but I would assume less than a full size router.) Questions that immediately pop into my head is how do you ensure that it would be cutting square to an edge of the board? Can you home it to a corner? Would it just fall off the board if you make it get too close to an edge? Or can it recover from a wheel going over the side? I know when we cut flooring that has a partial profile cut we often want to square the floor ourselves and go around any edge that is straight very near the actual size of the board. I also wonder if it can do contour cuts like foam profiles. Probably not since the wheels need to stay flat, but that would be really interesting.
I want one of these. I’m not sure how well it will work, but I want one. The concept behind this is great, but it seems like I’ve seen this before. I love having a CNC router at CMU; it does a lot of the work that I don’t want to do. That being said, I do think it makes us lazy sometimes. This robot router would only add to it. It might take just as long to tool path and cut, but the fact that it is portable might mean that people stop using their brains and hands to do the work and let the computer do it for them. As far as the technology goes, I question how the alignment and orientation works for this. I think the benefit to this is that it could be used at home and it isn’t limited to a certain size. Granted, materials are, but here we are limited to a 4’x8’ sheet. This router could be made to layout and route an entire floor.
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