The Core House is retooling.  It's been over 30 years since I built the core CNC cutter.  It's time to build a new one that will do everything- cut the blanks, cut the wings, hold better alignment, digital readouts and zeroing, modern software, it's about time.  I'll keep you posted!

I did add a couple of cheap DRO scales from iGuaging(seem to be the most reliable).  Less than $45 for two.  When I built the machine a single DRO cost over $1000.  The scales make checking the zero a snap.

Wow.  I thought you did it by hand, with templates & stuff.

Pictures!  Old and new!  I think you can buy cutters off the shelf these days, but that would be expensive and boring.

I assume you know more than I do about the openly available open-source CNC software for PC's, and all the various adapters to make it all work with modern hardware.  I did a web search not long ago and found that one of the more popular ones has been spun off into a set that was specific for foam cutting.

Still working on repairing the foam cutter.  This is getting to be as bad as the first time.  I spent ~100hours writing the program and troubleshooting, plus learning how to use CAD for the airfoils and translating into something the cutter would follow to more time sorting out the original driver board.  It turned out that the output byte for step/direction had to be fed to the driver in reverse order, bit by bit.  That took a lot of troubleshooting to figure out.

I tried open source now, didn't really work.  LinuxCNC is mainly for milling machines run through a parallel printer port.  It supposedly has an addon/addin for a four axis foam cutter, but I couldn't even get the Linux up and running.  Very hardware dependent- if someone hasn't written a driver for it it won't work.  Plus a ton of different versions/flavors with all sorts of interdependencies.  Windows is not great but Linux isn't really better, unless you are a real nerd.  Plus everyone wants to use Gcode, which is fine for a mill or lathe, nobody seems to be doing EDM(similar 4 axis to a foamcutter) and it's easier form me to scale the templates(usually larger/smaller than the foam) in CAD than in yet another program I'd have to learn.

I've finally found a program that at least will read in the templates I use(after modifying them to 1in. long).  The 1in. comes from the low speed airfoil project Mike Selig(now Professor) started at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  I've been working over the years with several SAE college program students doing the GoKart event(downforce wings).  Scaling airfoils up and down using the typical spline curves can result in significant 'wavies' in the airfoil, particularly around the leading edge.  I've always used polylines.  They are easy to tweak for getting the airfoil exactly the way I want, with spar slots and other things like internal cutaways.  Some CAD programs will save the file in a simplified text file that produces polylines as two column text so its easy to translate into foamcutter language and be easily able to cut multiple panels in one block.

The other big problem has been hardware and the either $$$$ or poor documentation.  I've had to spend hours trying to figure what will work with what.
Looks like the homestretch now though.  Just two more wires to go until I can see if it's going to work!

Thanks, Triain, for the reference.  Beautiful job on the machining.  Now I'll have to CNC my mill too.

I got the electronics for the cutter working and finishing off getting it installed.  The driver board is a TB6860, a cheap Chinese board now in its 4th generation.  The first ones were pretty awfu from what I read onlinel.  This newer one worked right off the bat.  Finally went back to Mach 3 for running and Foamworks 4.0 for the G code.  It looks like I won't have to edit any of the cutting files I have, which is a plus.

They talk about how you can find anything on the Internet.  Laugh.  It took a month to find out that Mach 3 has a trial mode that runs 500 commands for free.  In the meantime, I'd spent another month chasing Arduino and driver shield boards.  Turned out I'd have to write the program.


Should be working by the end of the week(4th of July).

I used Profili Pro to generate the code.

Boy do I hate wiring plugs!  Especially square ones that aren't keyed!