🚀 go-pugleaf

Have you ever come across the IBM/Technovate robot?  It's
work cell is exactly a pie shape because of its design and
in the stowed position took up a space at the back of the
table maybe 1 foot by 3 foot?  This might be a design you
could look at.  I did a web search but didn't turn up any
pictures of it, so if you haven't come across them, I can
draw up a quick drawing and post it for you.
We have a number of CNC machines here and although it can be
a lot of work, I have taken drawings and even photos,
scanned them in, converted them to vector drawings through
Corel Trace, exported them through Corel draw as a DXF file
or a Plot file (Our equipment recognizes both).  The results
were incredible to say the least.
Now where you're coming from, it's a lot of work but very
do-able.  You might be best off buying a prebuilt gantry or
something the like, but the mechanical end of things is
going to be the easy part because if you can dedicate a
computer to drive the system, the computer does all of the
work for you, you just put in your simple CNC code or
whatever cartesian coordinates you want (Personally I think
CNC is simple, covers all bases you'd need to cover, and is
conventional - you could get software premade to create your
CNC files for you readily), the computer figures everything
out for you.
Here's the principle:  Build (or buy) your gantry system,
steppers are the easiest to use in this case.  Once you've
built it up (or if you're REALLY organized, you design it
into the system!) you calculate or measure the distance one
step move the head position.  Once that is figured out,
that's when the math gets complicated.  The computer
calculates the X,Y paths and merely takes the appropriate
steps to follow that path.  Curves are accomplished with sin
functions, etc...  Because of the mechanical advantage
usually built into even a low-tech gantry system, they can
be incredibly accurate if you keep your backlash and all
around slop in the system to a minimum.
I have looked into building similar systems and honestly I
have a dificult time describing how this works but in
reality if you can have a dedicated computer to drive it,
you can even drive through the printer port quite easily and
with incredible accuracy and potential.

Feel free to query me some more if I've made absolutely no
sense at all here or if you want more info and I'll see what
I can do.

Regards,
Ian Juby


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