"scott" <sco### [at] spamcom> wrote:
> Wow that's cool!  The lego model is great.  I hope it works out.  What are
> you planning to use it for?

mostly milling scaled hull models for ship design, fibreglass molds,
the odd aluminium drilling, 3D measuring (copy/mirror/scale
existing molds), maybe some pick-and-place PCB stuff.

I used the visualMill demo software, which can show the full
cutting path on the screen. I saved the cutting path to a text
file using an OpenGL-logger :-).

it would probably be not very difficult to write something
in povray using the trace function. the cutting path is
converted to accelerate - const - decelerate sequences for
each motor (and compensating for the non-linear movements of
the machine) the acceleration list is then converted to the
timing for each step of each moter in real-time on a dos PC
(with all interrupts disabled) i can do 3 motors at > 100.000
steps/sec. on a 166 MHz pentium, using the 166 Mhz 64-bit cpu clock.

this project stopped about a year ago, but I now have
a big TOS-SN50 (6.5 KW) lathe (not looking as nice as
http://www.lukesmachinery.com/media/TOS-SN50-Lathe.jpg )
so things should be on the move soon.

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