Who am I?
I’ve had an odd career path. I’ve done a lot of things Professionally – CNC Machining, CBRN in the USAF, Firefighting, Police, Emergency Management, Computer Programming, Web Design, Photography / Videography, Computer Networking, technical support. For fun: Search and Rescue, Teaching Gardening Classes, A Psychology Bachelors Degree, Hunting, Fishing, Interning at a Vet and an animal disease laboratory, working in a lab for several years studying traumatic brain injury and another building video games to study psychological phenomenon.
One thing is always in common – I always end up being the IT guy, with the exception of when I worked in IT departments. I’ve whipped up a lot of random computer software through the years to solve whatever problem that no existing solution would, and I’ve spent literally thousands of hours researching software requirements for various proposals.
What is this for?
Somewhere along the way, I fell in love – hard – with machining. Enough that I’m working towards a mechanical engineering degree to keep getting deeper into manufacturing. I’m a little ashamed to admit how many hours I’ve sat and watched videos, listened to podcasts, reading articles, etc. I am frequently surprised to see shops struggling with IT. I make excuses to sneak into as many shops as I can, and there are frequent common issues that they all struggle to address:
- Is our CAD/CAM system doing what is supposed to do?
Why does our post skip an M404 if you use two different 5 axis toolpaths in a row? How do we back up our files? How do we get a good work flow between the engineer’s CAD to the shop floor’s CAM to QC? - We have __________ process and the whole thing’s a pain point.
There is often some solution to the process for some other industry or application. You can generate g-code from excel for parametrized programming if you don’t have macro enabled, quote a job, or build a bill of materials automatically. A TESA height will fill out your inspection report for you. A few pieces of freeware will dramatically shorten common shop tasks. - We need custom software to do __________.
I well and truly believe any machinist that is smart enough to use Mastercam, or Fusion or Solidworks or AutoCAD is more than capable of writing that software themselves. I’ll walk through the steps to roll your own calculators, estimators, generators, etc. - We need to automate __________.
Yeah, you really do. How do you get your wire EDM to pick up part’s origins automatically on a repeat job? How do you get your Fanuc Robot with Haas integration to load more than one part in more than once vise at a time with custom cycles? How can I get to 24 hour lights out without risking a ton of wrecked tooling and scrapped parts? - We have to work around __________.
How do you write one program that will build a whole part family parametrically? How do you rotate points around on a five-axis rotary that doesn’t have dynamic work offsets? With and without knowing the center of rotation? With or without moving anything in CAD? How do you tram in an angle plate in the mill without a calculator or level? - We have to improve ___________.
How do you build systems? How do you address quality issues with software? - These computers suck.
How do I keep my network secure? How do I fix this dog-slow computer? Is Realview messed up in SolidWorks again? What video card do I need for this? - This software sucks.
I paid $XX k for this software and it can’t even chain this contour! - This control sucks
Why did they move this feature!? Why are we still using a floppy drive? Why does it overwrite my changes?
I’ll be blogging about all of these topics and more. I’m not sure where it will lead, but hopefully it will help somebody with some obscure problem!