Basic Videos - Suggestions

[tyskkvinna]

Hi All,

I am the Executive Director of The Geek Group. We are a federally certified non-profit organisation based in Michigan, that focuses on education and research in science and technology. One of our biggest projects is making educational, how-to videos that we release to the public, for free. These cover a large variety of subjects, in recent memory we have done them about building a recording studio (including basic construction skills, like drywall), videography, working with extruded aluminum assemblies, etc. A lot of "this is how you do X" and "This is what X is and this is how it works".

So, we recently received three CNC machines from Haas - a TM-1, TL-1 and SR-100. We have been working on production on CNC videos.

This is why I'm posting here

Can you offer any suggestions for what would be great to see in a video? It certainly does not have to be Haas specific, but that's the only brand of machine we have in the shop so any specific things for other brands would be hard to cover.

We have a wide variety in our audience, so there is no such thing as "too basic" or "too complex". I know we have quite a few people who did years of manual machining and are interested in making the jump to CNC. To those of you who have made the jump - what things do you wish you could have found out right away? What ideas were difficult to translate?

The first that came to my mind was offsets. But I'd love to hear any ideas.

Some ideas that I've already got down are...

-Toolholders (The different types, how they impact your workspace, etc)
-Offsets (The many different kinds and when to use them)
-The basics of Cartesian coordinates (I know, very basic - but as I said, no such thing as too simple)
-Absolute vs. Incremental programming
-Arcs
-Difference between 3-,4-,5-axis and limitations thereof
-Vcarving


I'm also going to be doing a few videos that talk you through the steps of taking a program, putting it into the machine (I know this varies from brand to brand), setting up the tools, the offsets, and then running it. I'm going to include the program featured in the video for people to download (going to try to get a wide variety of posts) so that they can do the exact same part. Simple things - a basic engraving, a helix, top of a sphere, etc.


I'd love to hear suggestions for any type of CNC related video. Things you wish you could have found out easily at one point or things you're still wishing you could just see done in video and it'd make more sense.

These are mostly aimed at those of us who love to tinker and maybe have a CNC machine in their garage, or are considering buying/converting one. Not trying to make up for school/apprenticeship at all.

Thanks!

[Gabe Newell]

One suggestion would be to attach a camera to the spindle to give a tool's eye view of a router. I had previously seen your videos on the SR100 on YouTube, and that's what made me think of this.

[panofish]

I would value some basics on taking a simple project from CAD design to CAM to Mach3 and producing a simple 2D shape cut of an aluminum sheet.

I think the biggest problem for the home CNC person is putting the whole process together.

I recommend using Mach3 since it is one of the most popular and robust apps.

Learning some G-code basics is helpful, but I'd rather focus on generating g-code from my CAD/CAM data and learning how to implement it properly to produce simple parts. For example, I want to focus on zeroing the part, defining multiple light passes on the cnc and things like that.

Just my preference.