I've been mulling an idea over in my head. Seeking ideas and opinions. I work with wood carving machines, doing large production runs in a factory setting. In order to increase production speed we have several large multi-spindle gang router machines. These are big and expensive custom built contraptions.
I've been seeing these very inexpensive Chinese CNCs. (We could buy a dozen of them for the price of one of our big custom machines.) And some of them don't even look half bad, in pictures at least. My idea, instead of having 1 huge multi spindle machine, what if we tried putting multiple small inexpensive machines side by side and controlled them as one machine. For example have 4 small 3ftx4ft routers lined up. I think I'd still like to have each machine have it's own Linuxcnc PC and they would be networked together. One of the PCs would be the master control and have the HMI. Arrange so that all 4 machines can be moved together as one, starting and running the same part program simultaneously, but also be able to do some things independently on each machine, like touching off, homing, jogging... I might even want the option to be able to operate each or selected machines independently at times if that might be convenient for the job(s) at hand or if one of them breaks down. How possible do you guys think this idea might be? How big of a stumbling block is the remote control of multiple instances of Linuxcnc by a single user-interface going to be? -- ======================================== Todd Zuercher mailto:zuerc...@embarqmail.com ======================================== ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
