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My hacker-space is working on getting a CNC. My concern is the n00b's that will be using the CNC (my self included).
So how do we n00b proof a CNC? So that worse case, they break a bit and not the machine and prevent damage from head crashes, ect....
Two things pop to my mind, Strain gages and current monitoring drive motors that would tie to the E-stop.
If the strain gages reads over a set LBs then it could trip the e-stop.
Current monitoring drive motors, i am not to sure on this one with the suges that a motor would pull could cause false alarms.
So how do we n00b proof a CNC? Any Ideas?
Thanks,
As someone whom has installed load cells for this kind of thing, it aint easy to get them working the way you'd think. 2 simple things you can do..
Set soft limits so they cant hit a vise etc..
Turn down the rapids so they have more time to react.
You aint gonna fully idiot proof a machine tool, just a smarter idiot will come around.
Soft limits can only do so much good. Sure the spindle doesn't hit the vise, but what about when you have a 4" long drill bit in the spindle and your Z-1 inadvertently becomes Z-11? There is no real substitute to having at least a little training. It may be beneficial to have a "CNC deposit" where if you damage the machine, you don't get your deposit back. It would make operators pay more attention when their money is at stake and it would help to mitigate repair costs. The only downside is it would be a pain to manage the funds to anyones satisfaction. Failing that, just having a fickle machine without much power will make it difficult to do major damage.
Matt
IMO, soft limits and hardware limit switches and things, are always standard operating procedure.
"Turn down the rapids" very good idea, never crossed my mind.
training: How about a really good training video?
CNC deposit: I don't like the idea of a deposit from the user view. You break it, you pay for it to be fixed Else you will be banned.
Note: Everyone buys there own bits.
If i can't stop it from getting broken then maybe the damage can be limited by using some plastic shear couplings, shear pins, or Slip clutches that way there is a very weak point that can break under abnormal conditions but yet not add any back-lash.
I had a collage instructor say the same thingOriginally Posted by underthetire
He also said "Never under estimate the button pusher"
pu-teh-to poh-ta-toI had a collage instructor say the same thing
He also said "Never under estimate the button pusher"
If he had been more concerned with teaching and couching your understanding in logically consistent terms rather than venting his rage at the nature of humanity he would have stated it slightly differentlyI think some people either grew up so young they don't remember what it was like before that, or they are just some neato kind of person different than me who was never impressionable.
You can't 'idiot' proof anything because we're a race of idiots by this sort of definition, inventive idiots, as opposed to say a tiger or wolf or probably any sort of animal which would be comparatively predictable geniuses. But we monk it up (or at least I did) because we then are told by the same (again, the one I ran into) system that a genius is inventive as well, instead of just intelligent (quick thinking vs long thinking). ANway, thats what it feels like to me, that the flaw in the system is that what we mostly call intelligence in ourselves (quick execution of instinct, be it inherited or constructed) we want to call pure instinct (with the assumption that its quick) in animals. So we assume animals aren't capable of fear, hesitation? Dunno.
Either way, the thing that makes us special is that we're not just one animal, we're a self-programming animal. We can write most of our own instincts (medical science is finally catching up with this concept of free will as its starting to grudgingly (and somwhat befuddledly as near as I can tell heh) admit that the brain is extremely 'flexible,' that certain areas can be 'repurposed,' I imagine eventually it'll get down to the root of the matter near something like intelligence is similar to your fast, reliable, cheap industrial control chips, military grade stuff thats always on quick call and not slowed by complex processes and synchronization, whereas inventiveness is more like a bank of blank, writeable ram, with an somewhat equitable resource cost and value between them so that both are used, with the animals finding their balance closer to the solid state or simple or rom or w/e end of the spectrum, reliable unchangeable instinct, and we sacrificed the benefits of that (quickness, smarts, accuity, w/e) in exchange for the ability to understand and predict patterns, but this is just guessing from spending a lot of wasted time thinking about how the only mind I can see into works, and guessing about others)
This is the 'smarter idiot.' We're not a simple selection of a few bits of information, we're programmers with a general purpose system, and we all end up with a different set of programs from somewhere around the fringes of the bios to the display and other output software. Tower of babel for religious folks, the problem of the isolated awareness for the rest. The reason people say things like 'the smarter idiot,' or at least the reason I would say something whenever I wasn't managing to catch my more malignant tendancies (trying to teach myself to get a thrill out of catching and stomping one, its surprisingly easy in the immediate but ofc it will take years to make it effortless) is because the other way to express it is that I can never be smart enough to predict the architecture of all the minds that might use my machine.
Nothing is idiot proof, because we are all idiots in completely unique ways just like we're all geniuses in completely unique ways (and cross your fingers that someone thinks your genius is worth enough to live off of, otherwise its workin' in the coal mine - or becoming a politician or lawyer heh, lying is a pretty basic human trait, part of our programming ability, designing artifacts and distortions into transmissions). If you're trying to make it mass available, someone's eventually gonna get hurt, that's just how it is. I'd be more concerned about that honestly, b/c no matter what kind of contracts you sign, in America you're never safe from a lawsuit unless you've got the better lawyer, and the best lawyers tend to go where the money is. Not much money in defending an independent manufacturer, but there IS in removing him from the competition and making more room for the big boys, and even moreso in creating any sort of public outcry that can be manipulated to pass REGULATIONS to cut off yet another layer of that competition) so unless you're old money you're gonna be screwed if you don't shield it, at least so I would think. Maybe even in the Federated states ofa judge would listen to the 'If he didn't know it was dangerous, he shouldn't be allowed in public" argument for something so blatant as a milling machine, but whenever I've thought about trying to set up something like a hackerspace those thoughts have begun with machines enclosed in nice sturdy cast concrete boxes preferably with cameras instead of windows, and heavy (Perhaps hinged concrete) flaps to cover most of the feed slots when outer containment is open, and once you've got a little dough (or anything using plasma heh) from what I understand something more heat resistant than that wouldn't be a bad investment. But mebbe we're talking more the kinda thing that would be required for the easy-bake oven version notpeople who are presumably signing some sort of "I won't be a greedy d-bag" clause to get in the door.
If you're a hacker tho, experimentIf there isn't a cheap layered safety system there should be. There's the BEAM (or KISS, either way) robotics principles, there are berjillions of cheap sensors (and things that can be turned into sensors) laying around the average house, not even accounting those with electronics bins. I've only just gotten the cash I need to start on the most basic systems (to buy the chips, my brother does maintenance at my apartment complex so I might well be able to get motors out of washing machines and such at general scrap prices, and the rest of the washing machine could be raw materials or perhaps more armor cladding). I've already got teh skeleton, but I'm kinda nervous about it; not planning on having any high heat any time soon but the skeleton I wanna used is galvanized angle (figured I'd fill it in spiderweb style, (?)maybe leave the connecting bolts loose to lessen any transmission of shock through the steel inside the concrete(?) and fill up the holes with a bunch of spare bolts I had from the last thing the steel was being used for for reinforcement, before putting some mesh on it maybe, but anyway I'm wondering if it might not be a bad idea to layer on fire bricks or clay on the inside, or something else to keep the concrete or galvanized from popping or spewing noxious fumes should either get hot enough? Mebbe an inerior reversed radiotor system, the tips of the fins set into the outer layer of the concrete so the flat base is pointing at the machine on all sides (thinking AL like used in computers, its not a big box I'm gonna be putting around the not so big machine I plan) and resevoir up top for quick flood/drain cooling if it gets too toasty for either of the cheaper materials? Dunno, trying to find ways to save money.
Ah, another one that occured, perhaps rigging the infrared sensors of a controller to catch the scatter off no-no objects which you mark somehow (bits of aluminum foil)? Either way, kinda like a nuclear power plant you'd layer a bunch of systems that all together SHOULD trip a braking/slowing system anywhere within a wide buffer of the danger zones, with it taking all of them to fail catastrophically for the occasional 'melt down' which you must plan for as a definite occurance (and if you get lucky, yay, the rainy day preparations could be a nice complement to your retirement plans)
Take it all with a grain of salt ofc, I don't know crap about crap, just that I enjoy loopin around on logic, not even sure if my constructs are valid or not. Sorta the purpose of building a little cnc machine, to see if they are
Oh, xbox connect camera, all you hackers have those don't you?EIther something moving or pulsing spots of laser light trip the sensors on all the bad areas, the moving table gets recorded constantly ofc, and it hits the brakes if at any point the table is too close to the marked points or just not in the position that the nc says it should be in at that point. Its not exactly a cheap system, but MS depends a lot on monopolizing/taxing software sales for their systems, so the price is probably lower than it'd be if they produced the same sensor specifically for damage control, and lots of hackers seem to have picked one up here or there already. BUt yeah, lots of stuff like that layered, and studied in safe and well thought out tests until you know the limits and the sweetspot for shutoff where it goes off for no reason the least often, and ofc your operators check and fix the problems once everything's verified safe. Thats all I can really think of, in general, and if you're a hacker you'll probably enjoy the specifics just as much as I do (tho I wouldn't call MYSELF a hacker, thats just because when I was growing up the term didn't mean a scrounger/scavenger/reuser/modifier or w/e, it meant a peed off little kid who was out to wreck other people's systems for fun, and the people we mean as Hackers now were just Craftsmen or DIYers (later on) or Duct Tape Mobsters (okay made that one up).
It's true though. Couldn't tell you how many times I've seen people by pass safety circuits cause they were inconvenient, causing massive damage. One guy decided to make some copper fuses out of bar stock cause he didn't want to go to the hardware store. Guess what happened next....I had a collage instructor say the same thing
He also said "Never under estimate the button pusher"
Just skip to the next red type (after it) if you don't want to waste time on me rambling and trying to explain my viewpoint to remove errors that might arise from my monked up understanding of the english language (native but anti-social).
I would not know, I can only guess, because the standard language education system which apparently you excelled at, I failed at. I had one FANTASTIC instructor early on, and I think that was one of my main holdups (other than being the whole time int he process of one of those typical sob stories about killing your kindness because of a mean world blah blah, luckily my mother and stepfather, and my more removed family as well, were more loving than it should be possible for such a supposedly evil race as human beings to manage; I might have done better if they'd just sent me off to military academy or something like that, honestly I might have even been better off if they'd been terrible people - my own father's parents were and while he is somewhat distant as a result he also has a work ethic like none I've ever seen, he gets paid very well at what he is doing but he is still no doubt only recieving a tiny fraction of the wealth he is generating, and yet he is loyal to his company and he works like a slave, all hours no question, without even the assurance that they will give him the same in return (in reality they probably don't have many employees like that so if he gets fired then it'd probably be a good indicator the whole damn company's about to go under). Not a better person just... not happier either just I suppose more societally acceptable, not content either but... I dunno, life would have been much simpler, much... again not easier. I don't know the word for this.
However, they didn't, they stuck to their guns and they just kept on loving and instead of ending up a monster in some jail cell, blowing my brains out, or worse a monster on the loose, I got to a point where I might do some good for the world. I don't know if I'll ever be happy... I really blasted my mind, and I really can't put that one on them, its mostly because I got told I was smart just for doing what any kid could in school so I didn't believe them, I tried to act smart but instead I bought the crap they were feeding to the rest of the kids, and here in rural north carolina that's basically "get ready to be some rich northerner's serf, because there ain't any other options." Not all teachers were like that ofc, just the run of the mill and I had one of the very best of the profession in first or second grade and then a long run in the mill, so by the time I bumped into any more of the gold nuggets in the gravel I was deaf and dumb to any motivation.
So yeah, what knowledge I formed I formed mostly on my own. I took in a lot of information in school, but I never tried to learn and as a result I did not form any knowledge. I was simply trying not to get in trouble. As the material went from that early education stuff that is either meant as a waste of time in between history class and sociology and the others that are there to go ahead and forge young minds into good, unquestioning little worker bees who think the federal government is the next best thing to the second coming of Christ or (possibly?) to boost the illusory 'dumb' kids' confidence before they get to the meat and potatoes (but near as I can tell the smart and dumb kids thing is meant to get the ones who are mechanical minded willing to make new machines for their lords, and to get the ones who are communication/people minded to think they're dumb so that there's no threat that they'll take over from the current politicos who are ofc nothing more than anyone in a service or other supposedly 'low skill' job who enjoy lying and cheating instead of it being a distasteful part of the job).
I got my info from here and there then. Most of what I actually paid attention to in school was physics, tho I was wrecked before they ever let me near any books as powerful as that, so its actually one of my least developed faculties (instead I was already doing physics but thinking about the stuff I had around me that I did understand. In other words, what we call mechanics, design, w/e). However, random assumption, I would guess that the regular fuses are not copper or are either doped with some element with a higher heat tolerance than copper, or that the copper bar stock has some common (perhaps unintentional, 'defect') dopant. Again, and really going out on a limb here, since a fuse blowing too early wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem as one that didn't blow when it needed to (? For most applications at least? Because I didn't realize a lot of what I thought was physics that was physics going on in my head was really what society calls mechanics/engineering, I stuck away from practical applications like they were the plague, never uilding anything that WASN'T bubblegum and duct tape for fear that I would prove not 'smart' enough lul) so I would guess that the home made fuses lasted too long and a motor or circuit that was worth considerable money was destroyed, or someone was hurt.
If he didn't know it, I suppose you can call it stupidity. I certainly call it that in myself, but then I have to assume I'm going to burn in hell or some variation of it (honestly the worst hell I can conceive of is sitting in something like the void of deep space for eternity, without the stars or the interstellar dust and foam, without even the universe having the decency to let your blood boil out and you die a quick if agonizing death, or even to feel pain - basically perfect sensory deprivation forever without the capability to quiet the spirit; pain quiets the spirit, puts the lower reptile functions in control of the brain, it seems that Dante's vision of hell would be much superior to such deprivation) to be able to actually act like a good person because whenever I accept the whole 'ask for forgiveness and you shall achieve it' thing, I fall into a logic loop where I can't tell if I'm being good or just greedy/fearful/self loving. Besides, I might want forgiveness but all those years my parents were loving me too much for me to be able to give up the last fleck of my... humanity I suppose (I think we're kidding ourselves about humans being evil by nature... or I suppose the human animal is, but the being inside of it isn't, its just that its armature, the human animal, isn't born with the programming to let the being understand that the other animals it sees all around it are really just what it looks like from the outside, more than moving pictures, aware and feeling; I understood that before I ever ran into a genuinely bad person (not even evil, just bad, seriously my family's pretty awesome, to the point where I feel like I'm stealing from all the people without the luck to be born to such a thing), and I can still remember what life was like to some degree back then, before school and the wider world made me understand, believe, all those words of warning that my parents had given me about how hard the world was. It HURT to have people hurt around me, to have them unhappy, discontent, sad, apparently lonely, anything like that. And not it hurt like I was afraid they were gonna strike out, it hurt as soon as I became aware of it, almost before I even saw the person, I got that feeling that I think people call eyes on the back of my head like they were radiating hurt, and I felt it almost before I saw the expressions on their faces, the stoop of their shoulders, the tension of muscles; they didn't even have to be aware of me, I didn't even like going out in public, was antisocial even when I was nice, because it hurt hurt hurt to see some homeless person or even just children or adults who were clearly down on hard times even if they appeared happy on the outside in most cases, as if ragged spots all over their clothes, the angles just a little too sharp to be from exercise, all of these things spoke and they said HURT. It took me ten years to kill that out of a selfish desire to protect myself from the world, just because some other kid I thought was my friend, my pack leader, sicked one of his best goons on me on the playground. THAT didn't even hurt, the kid was a foot shorter than me and the first time he landed a good shot was when he quit trying to hit me and tackled me into a tree, and then I was too light headed and sitting on the ground still all confused as to what had happened and my former friend, his goons, the rest of the gang were running off before one of the teachers on the yard got there. It didn't start hurting until afterwards, until it finally caught up to me that someone who I'd given my loyalty too had just tried to hurt me for no better reason than to reinforce his power over the rest of the group i hung out with, and then I empowered the ten year chunk of will that was necessary to kill the kind part of myself; and its dead; I can only imagine resurrection is gonna be harder than the original killing). On top of that, it took another five years after that to kill my guilt, to make the DECISION to become evil and to succeed enough to see the devil in the mirror, to see the lines of similarity between all of the movie monsters, to understand that the werewolf and the vampire and the rest were originally MEANT to be no more than fables explaining the same changeling nature of truly Evil beings and that the people we call evil are mostly just BAD men doing evil deeds, that the saying 'everyone thinks they're the one who's doing the right thing,' and others like it only applied to humans, not MONSTERS, which is what you become when you decide to be evil... I never took the final step, never went out into the world and started trying to tear other souls down to my level, to kill good OUTSIDE of myself, but I saw what was there and it wasn't my will that kept me away from it, it was my mother and my step-father and my brother, it was them being willing to just keep loving and not boot me out (once it was too late, by the time I'd come to love evil and the only guilt in me about it was that that they injected with their love when I couldn't manage to avoid them, if I had managed to get free of them completely I would have been on America's Most Wanted or in prison for life within a couple years) and not by taking out any hate they might be suppressing for me in some intervention (seriously, just kick 'em out. Don't you understand what tigers do when you back them into a corner? Well, a monster, an Evil person, they're sort of like tigers with all the inventiveness of men, without any of the consciousness that would make a tiger feel shame and become a civilized beast eating fake reconstituted soy steaks or chemically grown proteins if it could look so far into the future or so deep into itself as we can... if they'd pulled one of those self-delusional attacks on me instead of just loving and ASKING me to talk until I finally saw the devil a bit too close up and decided I didn't want to see any more, that I'd rather to have them than It, to trust their judgement, that would have probably been all it took for me to shake them loose and jump right through the mirror where I thought I belonged, where I would be accepted; dunno if it sthe same for drug interventions but for the people they do them to who are just destroying themselves with hate and depression, unless they're really smart or you hit them at JUST the right time when they're already about to come over on their own, FORCING therapy upon someone is no better than trying purposefully to make the situation worse, or for that matter than throwing them in a metal box in the desert to ferment)...
Dunno, as you can see by how I keep parenthesizing everything instead of putting it all into its own discrete separate points, my command of the english language is pretty strongly mutated from the standard, I was antisocial but I read a lot so I didn't end up with few enough words that people would immediately discount them; back when I wanted to I could just let the words come out that people wanted to hear, always got told I was great at public speaking even when I hadn't prepared at all and I was terrified of sounding stupid because of it the whole way through, but I suppose that's part of courting the devil... its like you can just open your mouth and vomit a mist of alcohol and opiates into the air to stupefy your audience, or more accurately like you've got some superpower where you can turn a switch and your mouth will start flapping without you trying, sucking the words which people associate with truth right out of their mind and repeating them. Ofc NOW, when I try and actually EXPLAIN honestly something I understand, it comes out like this, a horrible cobble where I'm trying to qualify everything and where I'm constantly having to throw in side notes to try and cancel out the liar's fog, because eventually you break the switch and you can't turn it off, it comes without thinking. I suppose that's why people say being a good liar is about believing in it; what they don't understand I think is that you can separate your belief entirely from yourself, separate your controlling mind, your spirit, from all of the instincts of your body, and literally TELL it what it believes, say the words and then retract from your mind into the background and it'll keep on going and believing whatever you told it last, I suppose thats the thing you're instinctively going after when you finish the decision to be cold and hard and untouchable and take the next logical one, the decision to be Evil, Dangerous, because you've tasted enough violence and hate that you like it more than it gives you guilt)
Anyway, again sorry for all of the rambling but I was trying to make it so you could understand where I am coming from when I say that if that was what you are calling stupidity, it is what I call a holey education. I've been studying (and I guess I was at least originally what standard society calls smart before I tried to change myself into what I"m thinking of as smart, or intelligent, everyone always said so even in school where they're already starting to lower your expectations from day one down south, or at least in the backwoods down south where I grew up; not a race thing, we're just poor as hell (I"m actually white, didn't want you to think it was just racist teachers, and that really good teacher I was talking about was actually a little old black lady, and probably not even capable of racism since she was practically giving all the understanding she had formed away for free instead of going to the college level of education where she could have probably used it to buidl a greater understanding and gotten paid ten times as much to have a TA do her work while she tried to make herself and the school some more money on their equipment) more or less nonstop for the past three months, more so at the end as I've repaired a little bit more of my mind, as less of it must be dedicated to the decision to be good to keep the Evil down so that it takes longer until the brain gets worn out and forming more knowledge becomes painful and then agonizing to the point where my awareness becomes fragmentary, but I've probably spent as many hours doing the only thing that I can form understanding from (I HOPE some day I'll be a good enough person again to just trust others words, to even believe that they could be anything other than bias used to make me more likely beneficial to them), reading and reading from a source where every statement is open to criticism, question, outright hateful attacks, as I would have in a school. I spend probably eighteen hours a day now studying, and am about to try and build my first machine (for 'prototyping' as most say, tho I have no interest in mass production; mebbe some limited runs, but I ain't planning on patenting nothin' good ideas are easy, its making them safe and legal thats hard, and I'd rather just give the ideas away and maybe sell a limited run and try and get enough cash to live on and to expand my infrastructure slightly so I can try bigger and bigger concepts out; mostly I just want the machine to give me the rough cuts, and the parts that don't need to be precise, so I can do the fine work by hand or if it is too fine in a tensioned or geared shake-reduction micro-manual work surface I have been thinking of for some time), but I'd say that its probably been more like an average of twelve hours a day of good study because when I first started trying to research things that I knew to be physically possible to complete (and so fail at) instead of wal-mart style cheap orbital techniques and other stuff that seemed to actually be impossible for me to achieve (back then heh) I was only doing so in starts and stops because my brain couldn't handle as much un-interrupted math (think I mean shape matching in normal English, its what I do most of my logic with; I can 'visualize' in really high dimensions but honestly I don't think that's special, I think I just see more like other ppl feel because I am super nearsighted (think thats what its called, where you can't see far away but (apparently, and noone ever indicated this to me tho it makes sense in retrospect) can see fine down to lower resolutions than 20/20 people), so basically I probably got into the habit of faking most of my environment up in my mind, which I did by feeling the shapes of the things that I thought I saw to guarantee that light was only glittering off them in the right places for my sim to be right; this fits at least with the large number of artifacts that appear in my vision even when I am perfectly awake and aware, things that I seem to see clearly even things right near the center of my vision that will turn into something completely different (what they really are) or sometimes slightly different, other basic shapes tho, if I actually stop to study them (looking at THEM not the area they're in)) so while I was still spending every waking hour 'studying' i was often having a problem both taking and processing information and keeping my mind quiet enough to expand upon it without stopping taking in new info, so I was basically just staring off into space a lot or getting distracted rather than learning as I read and not stopping.
So yeah, I might have a lot of info in my head, maybe even as much as I could have gotten from a two year degree (tho not ALL on machining; the cnc wasn't even my first inspiration, the thing that made me think I could be happy without being a monster or just giving into alcoholism or some other escape in this world was the concept of sea steading, was knowing that there was still somewhere on the face of the earth where you COULD still be free if you innovated enough or were willing to accept harsh enough conditions to overcome the obstacles; my interest in CNC came a bit later once I started succeeding more at being good and saw that I could do better things by dedicating myself to this, that I could possibly help to change the numbers so that the third world could keep on growing into the first and America could keep on growing right with them, basically that I could help make it less of a zero sum situation with an understanding of CNC, and then I got convinced here that it would be impossible for me to make enough money from a scavenge resource start to get to where I had a good enough machine to really do anything meaningful, and I had a gaming pc, so I started spending my 'cooldown' time when I wasn't studying as assiduously (been using thoughts about the connections between physics and its strange treatment of the observer and will/awareness as a force, allowing myself to think of the differences we draw going from rocks to mice to monkeys to humans as potentially related more to our own communication failures rather than facts, its actually quite a fun exercise when its not scary how much sense a lot of the ancients' writings make from that perspective, how much all the religions and philosophies start simplifying and collapsing into each other, its almost like eventually it could be a POINT and I could have some math for it, some graphite shapes on paper that could tell other people what I am feeling)) and I had an old gaming pc so I spent a ton of time as well studying games and programming, taking inspiration from Notch and his Minecraft (from nothing to three million dollars of beta sells on opening weekend, before the game was even done) while trying to dig up the functional structure of the programming logics, or i suppose numerical logic in general, which I figured could make some money to make a good cnc possible and also give me programming experience which would make it possible to make cheaper tools do more impressive works, perhaps to help get one of the open source cnc software sets up to commercial quality or even just to draw more programmers to them with one or two actual good ideas, and I had these ideas about chiral encoding of visual data and pixelized physics, basically a harmony between the fact that the mass market explosion of games has led to improvements mostly (almost only really) in shader technologies and other visual tricks rather than physics (half life 2 still more or less stands king as near as I can tell in generalized physics engines, if not its just the unreal engine which almost EVERY console shooter or action game is a modification of) or animations or other interactive elements, basically to take what they developed as visual tricks to try and build themselves up facebook style on community and peer pressure alone, to trick enough into being impressed with vids and screenshots that by the time they got bored a week after the game came out everyone they knew was playing it, to take that and combine it with some small insights into how information might well be encoded (and compressed! the universe might not be able to create and destroy information, but I would say that even if science is right on the mark the big bang kinda indicates that it can be COMPRESSED practically without limit, and math, understanding, these are all constructs of information not the raw thing) in the real world and in our minds and make one of those indy games that does so well, not necessarily another minecraft but enough to get me a machine built and then to keep supporting whatever community I drew in the game, and a lot of this seemed like it could apply to error checking in material removal (since my whole system was basically based on taking collisions between 2d rasters and seeing the physics of the 3d shapes they represent, might be some stuff in there once I develop the rough ideas long enough that could help with photoreceptive checks, server encoder backups and all that good stuff, not to mention obviously its just plain annoying that some of the programs require you to put in the proper blank to execute the cuts instead of just figuring out where in any blank thats large enough they can make them). Anyway, my five year old 'gaming' computer whose ram was already starting to fail one slot at a time finally got to the point where I couldn't go more than a minute or two without it suddenly shutting down, bsod on windows and linux (black for linux rather than blue ofc) with error messages that basically told me I didn't have the cash to fix it (the mobo's almost certainly fried and everything else COULD be by the array of messages, failure modes, etc, so to be SURE i wasn't wasting money I'd need enough to just rebuilt it) and I was left w/ nothing but a netbook to develop on.
That left me thinking basically about just expanding on minecraft, perhaps trying to write some code that would be helpful to Notch and his team and seeing if they thought it was worth throwing me a few bones for, enough to build a good diy machine, that and doing tome scrapping (dumpster diving and curb pickups mostly) to make a little bit of money here and there the surplus of which mostly went into my lungs as tar :S because I knew it wasn't ever gonna be enough for what people were saying was necessary to make money (didn't realize you guys were just assuming everyone wanted a factory in their house, I just wanted something that could get the prototype parts and the parts for my one-offs near enough to done that I didn't lose patience taking material away a flake at a time with a piece of sandpaper or a sharp knife; I can't even get away with using a dremel above the lowest setting for any amt of time or at night or my neighbors complain, and i figured if I was already gonn have to build a sound isolation box to get my work done I mite as well do it out of concrete since I have concrete floors anyway in my second floor apartment, surround it with a couple old mattresses, and put in a small cnc as well to rough the parts out that was nowhere near big enough to explode through the thickness of concrete, board and sheet metal i was planning on shielding my box w/ so I didn't have to worry about it hurting anyone else). So I kept following the programming anyway, figuring if i could either get minecraft working on my netbook (its a VERY inefficient game from what I understand, on top of having environments with the only non-fluid variable being the bedrock that you'll probably never even dig down to) or make it run smoothly enough online for combat to work well (the servers are already used like massively multiplayer servers, they are persistent, and no persistent game has had good interactive combat yet, I played a lot of those mmos before accepting that they were all either gonna be point and click 'adventures' that were little more than stat increase based legal addiction mechanisms or it was gonna have mediocre combat that was semi-interactive and not be truly persistent in the traditional sense) then the code might be good enough to go from mod to ingame code, which a couple of mods have before. Then I couldn't really find any info on whether he PAID those guys anything, and I saw he's signed a deal with Microsoft, and seen some other things that make me think he might be losing his moral values in proportion with his gain in wealth, so I figured that I wasn't very likely to get enough to make the machine THAT way, that I was most likely just gonna give cash to a misled person who was giving cash to bad or evil people and then still be left with nothing but whatever little happiness I brought other people with my code, so I kinda shelved those ideas and came back to cnc. But all of the little bits apply in different ways.
(PLease just read from here if you don't feel like taking in my horrid attempts at explaining the mutation of my version of the english language and getting rid of all the effects of me being a nasty person, a recovering monster, pretty much a zombie that was locked in an empty room with no victims up intil the point where some scientists came around with the cure but still has all that zombie in his head despite being supposedly human once again, sees that they're executing all the zombies that weren't locked away from people and knows he deserves it just as much)
Anyway, RAMBLE OVER, and for good now, I'm going to be going all day if I don't quit trying to qualify things and point out where I think I might be saying misleading things and all that and just get to the point. The guy either didn't know (and most people while they don't know all the dangers KNOW that fuses are to protect expensive things) or, more likely, he was the sort of person I am trying no longer to be and he simply did not care. Either it was his machine and he figured whatever he was doing was worth a helluva lot more than any risk that existed to his life or it was yours or someone elses and, to him, that meant it was worth exactly nothing. You may think of it as 'how could you do this on someone else' machine unless he's just stupid.' Well, that's awesome because it means you're a pretty good person at least - you might do some bad things, hell you might even do some evil things, but you're good at heart. Because to bad people the answer is obvious, it comes before that one even, it is because damaging and destroying things is the quickest way to make a profit and its much better to do that to other peoples things than to ones you paid for, because then the profit is even higher - its all profit, no costs except for one useful tool (the tool is the person with the tools to them, and yay that I actually feel okay about saying 'them' instead of 'us,' mebbe that means I'm talking about Evil people and I'm only a bad person now) that can be easily replaced with lies, which are free.
Bad people, and worse those who get high off being bad people, the truly Evil, have a much larger effect than their numbers in this world. They are in essence sorcerors in the sense that the ancients meant the word, they harness demons (hate, fear, anger and lies, I think I read somewhere or another where some monk or other christian scholar wrote down all the things that were 'demons' once but I don't remember, still basically its just emotions which have some measure of control over the person who is experiencing them) to do magic (magic originally being the use of hidden knowledge before we started calling alchemy science and sorcery politics (or political science I suppose), but basically when we say 'any technology sufficiently advanced,' I'm pretty sure we're just re-realizing what they originally meant, we just think we know almost everything today and we think we're somehow more highly evolved than them so we can't admit that anything, much less a lot, of what they left us might have been mathematically and logically sound, even correct)) for personal gain without regard for others. Every person in the world could literally be a genius and a small percentage of them evil, sorcerous, sociopathic or whatever else you want to label it, and it would still seem like the human race was remarkably stupid as long as most people had come into contact with at least one of the little (skyscraper sized) cockroaches in human(ish) skins.
Thats basically what I was getting at, really sorry for wasting your time if you read all the rest and it didn't help you understand what I meant with these words here, I'll go and red highlight the part where I started getting to the point
Kigiru, that is a lot of text.
my plc instructor is one of the best I ever had. what he said was in 1 class, the first half was about how operators would bypass safety and be idiots. the other half covered how you should always listen to the operator because he knows the machine better than you.
For the rest of the time that semester, I was doing four assignment per class, while everyone else was doing 1 assignments per class.
Parts of the plan:
A class that is mandatory.
Different classes of operaters that have different restrictions.
Have to swap rfid card to use CNC ( qualified to operate )
CNC inside a window-less bullet proof enclosure.
Dvr camera system to see inside and the operater.
The enclosure door has an embedded rfid chip (can't use magnet or tape)
The enclosure door has an embedded reed switches.
Some op-amps and microcontrollers to detect tampering with wires and operation.
Electric door lock when spindle is in use.
If any wrong usage: e-stop, lock machine down, sound alarm, log user id, record video, and send e-mail alert.
Of course there are some legal docs, disclaimers, waivers, and stuff that have to be signed.
Yeah sorry about the long text. I have a hard time saying what I mean and actually helping people
Heh. But anyway, it sounds like you're on the right track there. I thought you were saying proofing against people wrecking the machine, but for the other yes, build 'er like a fortress and identify every single route for shrapnel and hard wire it so that the circuit powering the machine is shut off if those routes are open (or either the tool is simply removed from the path, just seems to me that it would be easiest and safest to cut the power completely). Keeping them from wrecking it now, that would be some hardcore intricate planning and they'll still break it, but after a period of trial and error assuming they don't drive you broke you'll have developed what will probably be a very valuable limiting methodology for maker shops and others like that that are popping up all over. Personally as for shielding I"m thinking mostly concrete and sheet metal, but thats just a (because I can get the metal (should be able to) at a cheap price, scrap yard + a little (how they buy it not sell it) and b) I've heard awesome things can be done to reduce vibrations with different compositions of concrete. Heck, I've been fascinated with concrete and quartz and a few other materials recently, I grew up at just the right time to buy all the hype the research teams coming up with new products now are selling, didn't realize that none of these plastics were much they didn't do in the day with hemp and veggie oil, none of the composites anything more high level thinking than tossing strong new materials into a cement mixture, none of our computers anything that couldn't be done (sometimes less than) with clockwork.
In short I bought the thing about centralized industry being for the good of everyone rather than simply a concentration of monopolies hook line and sinker, and I've only recently (thanks in large part to sites like cnc zone and reading the words of the more experienced posters here who are making things that were a couple months ago magic to me) realized that it was no less of a sham than all the lies in the history books.
Best of luck with your project, and if you come up with anything good post it up
But yeah, I don't want to be an industrial engineer - don't get me wrong, a ton of my thinking over the past months has gone into the design of processes, but to make my money to expand my infrastructure I am planning on selling one-offs, selling robots or other things with unique capabilities and lots of sweat and attention put into their design, art that moves basically, probably paying myself very little for the engraving of the carapaces, painting, inlaying, w/e I choose for any individual auction item so that I can pay myself well for the time spent doing the intricate work on the bot. I enjoy both but the raw artistic stuff is just a plain giggle, seeing perfectly straight lines and curves and shapes spew from my mind into material... it is very satisfying, especially when i am holding it all in my hand. I wanna be a craftsman by trade, whatever industry I can drum up, whatever ideas, I may or may not bother to patent them to gouge the a-holes up top (probably not, I've been more evil than them, I get where they're coming from and its very tempting to just go out, give my morals up again, and take and take from society, punish them for making it so easy to rob 'em) but if I come up with anything real good I plan to post it up on the 'net for free like lots of peoplle are doing here. Not only is that sorta the whole point of living in a capitalist society (the scrooge mcduck impression we have now as near as I can tell came from fifty years of russian propaganda assisted by either federal incompetence or malice or both, I think before that people were at least ashamed to be openly greedy, malicious and uncaring. The idea I don't believe was to just sit on a stack of money, but to get rich so that you could change the world, so that you could fix the wrongs you see there, and it was assumed that the people who could fight their ways up to that wealth would be most successful at spending it for such purposes.
Might be completely wrong there, mebbe they really were just la... (lol can't speell this at ALL) faire... lazzei faire? FFS, I remember the spelling from economics class, its on the tip of my tongue, you know what I mean. Seen enough evil to know that for what it is tho, just like the communist idea that you should just let people live on the dole forever, let 'em rot in depression so they're willing to throw their lives away for no good reason. Way I see it however much money I can make off any good idea I mite come up with is only a fraction of the wealth and happiness it could generate if given out free; just need to make enough to eat, put a roof over my head and tool up, then I wanna take a sledge hammer to the philosophy behind this ridiculous system that is richer than at any point in history but still with nothing but bread and games for all but a literal few, a couple families, some of the serfs getting the bread of craftsmen and traders but still with all the rights of a serf or a slave just the same.
Oh, and I guess what I was trying to get at is don't write off the people you think might not give a damn, just watch them. If you don't want to deal with them you've got that right... personally I don't know if I do because I was that guy, I was in such a fugue since I can remember that I just wanted it all over, that I'd risk my life and anyone's equipment for an offhand chance at finding some way I could enjoy this world without burning it down (tho I didn't have enough motivation then to get out and learn any machine skills or knowledge, I was only dipping around in the most absurd fields that were almost certain not to pay off for decades or centuries more, either afraid of failure so going where it was the norm or hoping to hit the lotto with some startling leap forward, probably a bit of both but mostly the first). Its not a nice place... not at all; doesn't make them any better, but unless the thing that's conscious inside of you, unless the free will which you burn to create consciousness, awareness of the past and future, to empower your will across years and decades, unless that is something different than what is in me and in these others in you chances are in the same situation (and that means the same brain, at least the reptile and mammal brains, w/e is uniquely us I think is either in the central control or hiding in the cracks between quantum certainty) you would have done much the same. Not THE same - I think mebbe thats where the whole concept of good/evil comes from, the fact that with our actions we DETERMINE the nature of god, math, w/e, at least when we're outthinking the organic shell and keeping our heads about the cloud deck, we decide what it is to be conscious and have free will to spend, and our decision will propogate through all of the other universes of creation, through each and every person we are closely tied to and through them to every person, animal, rock and scrap of dust on the planet. Think a good model of the world could be drawn from the basis of humanity as a cloud of observers (all of humanity through all time, think mebbe the Oort cloud) watching a sphere of quicksilver and seeing in it all their diverse reflections, firing at it packets of will across the void and adding to the noisy ripples tearing across it.
Anyway, yet another tldr, sorry, but I'm really trying to be helpful these days. Really pisses me off that that used to be my nature then I killed that... guess I'm glad I got back to wanting it tho. Best luck, and thanks for trying to do something so awesome.
the best way to "idiotproof"any kind of device is "AWARENESS"
any automatic operating device should be considered LETHAL, in other words, treat a CNC as a very dangerous device..
CNC machines don't care what they're cutting, wether it be steel, or human flesh for that matter..
safety interlocks can ( and will be ) bypassed.. i know i did.. but.. as soon as you do.. imagine yourself facing an alligator (or any other dangerous animal) BE AWARE of what you are doing..
First and foremost.. GET TRAINING. Read, listen, and soak up all the info you can get..
Becoming a CNC operator takes a lot of time (years instead of hours)
I think a Hackerspace with a CNC is a cool idea but ... I am going to assume some things here... the first is that you currently have no machining capabilities at all. The second is that you have few or no members who are experienced in machining.
My honest advice is to look a getting a Bridgeport mill and a lathe to start with. I think to many people jump to cnc with out having the basic fundamentals down. Not to mention most don't even have the real need for a cnc at all. I know a cnc is "cool" but there is no way to totally avoid it getting crashed. There is all ways that risk. Its in every part you make with it... every setup... and every program you run on it.... the single best limiting factors are a good programmer / setup / operator.... and most importantly a well defined process for each step. The simple fact is that a cnc WILL GET CRASHED ..... and to be specific a "crash" is any unintended cut or movement that causes the tool, tool holder or any part of the machine to contact any thing solid. I am also a believer in "air crashes" ... they are the near misses that you were lucky enough to have go your way. Experience is the best teacher and you need years of it to run a cnc mill or lathe and avoid the bad crashes.
In my opinion you should start with a manual mill and lathe... if you don't already have one. They are vary useful and will cover 75% of all the parts you will need to make. Plus they are hard to crash
Just my $0.02
Hennessy
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