I am designing and trying to decide if I should build a 5-axis mill. I have in mind the parts I want build and they require smooth milling on both sides of a curved surface and surface orthogonal drilled holes. I’m struggling with two aspects of the design, the rotary drive joints which I described in another thread and how the SW would generate the control code. (Many decades ago I wrote CNC code generators professionally so at one point I knew the g-code stuff and could probably remember it if I refreshed.)
I’m somewhat surprised that there is not commercially available and cost effective 5-axis CAM SW or that there is not some thread discussing it. (I will not be surprised if someone says just go to xxx, as I not sure I have explored all the branches of this giant forum tree.)
To me it seems like it would not be particularly difficult to generate a set of elevation data as a function of x/y location and then estimate local slope from adjacent locations. For some cuts, the elevation and slope (actually directional gradient) would be all that is needed to generate commands to move the x/y/z and tilt the part in two rotations. (It takes a bit of arithmetic but it’s repetitious so a good subroutine should encapsulate it well and I think I could write that.) But defining some cuts, for example the bottom insider corner on a rimmed oval soup bowel, seem to require human imagination or really good AI. I’m not so certain how to address that. (To cut the soup bowel requires running a bull nose mill along the corner twice so that it is tangent to one surface on each pass. The SW that could automatically develop that solution would be interesting.)
But that seems like the sort of problem that computer scientist machinists would be deeply into. Are they out there?
Thank you
Tom  |