The saga continues

[stevem]

The latest addition to my Bot. A new, handy dandy, swing away monitor arm. Saves 12 square feet of floor space.
Yes, I know, where are the pics.

Next project: Welded tube Y carriage. Stronger, stiffer, lighter.

[stevem]

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[paco]

Very cool improvements as always Steve! Keep us informed!

[Brady Watson]

Nice idea, Steve.

I see you have the dust/spill-proof keyboard and (hopefully) an optical mouse. I would be careful about getting dust in the CRT monitor. There is very high volatage in there and being so close to the machine...it's going to get in all of the cooling holes. When I worked at a large silicon wafer production facility, we had a few of the monitors catch fire from silicon dust build-up. After we put a protective shroud around them...it never happened again.

Just a word to the wise...Sure looks convenient though!!!

-Brady

[stickman]

Steve, do you have some sort of custom dust collection boot?

[stevem]

Jay,

It's a dust collector/presure foot, for holding down the thin plastic sheets that I cut. The sheets are anchored to the table at one edge only, and held down at the cutter by the presure foot.

[phil_o]

I have a subscription to Woodworking at Home magazine. It's available on
DVD only. The author is building a home made CNC router. He has some
neat ideas. One is the control panel with joy sticks and special control
buttons for specific operations. I don't know how to post an image from
his DVD to show his control panel. His website is woodworkingathome.com.

[Brady Watson]

Phil,
You could do this on the ShopBot too, with an iPac keyboard emulator or gamepad. You could also do it using Mach2 (probably what he is using) as well.

-Brady

[jf_allie]

Here are some links to the products Brady mentioned:
The IPAC link:
http://www.ultimarc.com/

(Brady, do you have the Mach2 link, I seem to have lost it)

Another one:
http://www.groovygamegear.com/

If you have lots of spare change, this one could be fun...
http://www.xkeys.com/

cheers

[jf_allie]

ok, here is the Mach2 link:

http://www.artofcnc.ca/

[tim_in_mn]

I just finished upgrading to PRTalpha and have improved on my computer/keyboard setup. There is a lot of background clutter in the picture, but I hope you can make out the basic setup.

I made a computer cabinet for my laptop and suspended it above the xy corner of the ShopBot. It is mounted below my overhead wood storage racks. The cabinet swivels and has air vents top & bottom with a plexiglass door. Mounted under the cabinet is my wireless keyboard/mouse hub (not shown).

The wireless keyboard and mouse are in a plexiglass shelf, which is mounted on the end of the xy carriage. The whole shelf travels with the ShopBot carriage, for convenience.

To get the clearance between the top of the router and the computer cabinet, I replaced the ShopBot wire guide with a flat flex cable system. I added a slide shutoff for the 4" vacuum system at the point it connects to the alpha dust skirt.

The ShopBot control box is mounted just below the keyboard/mouse shelf.

To run a cutting file, the router is started with the control box, and a remote control switch starts up the dust vacuum system.

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[hank]

Brady,
2 questions, you mentioned in your 2-17-05 post that you could hook up a game pad to the bott for positioning. How do you do this?

I visited your website. Looks great, especially the digitizing of small objects. I've tried this before without much luck, all I get is alott of points that are very difficult to turn into surfaces. How do you get this level of detail by digitizing?

[Brady Watson]

Steve,
Check out this thread (http://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/messages/27/332.html) it should answer all of your questions about the gamepad.

As far as digitizing goes, I have 2 digitizers. 1) The shopbot probe, which I use for large 3D objects (over 6" square) and 2D profile scanning and 2) A Roland Picza 3D scanner for smaller, more detailed objects. The SB scanner is pretty good down to about .02 step resolution...and it does take a very long time to scan at that res. The other issue that I have found with it, is that it offsets the resulting scan 1/2 the diameter of the stylus outward. Not a big deal on large scans with 1/16" probe..but it definately washes out more detailed reliefs.

The picza on the other hand, will do down to .002" step resolution. I have yet to need to go down that low. I typically scan at .008-.016 which speeds up the process significantly with no loss of detail. So if you want to do high-res 3D scans you need to either get a Picza or makes friends with someone who has one!


-Brady