11. Machine design


Eleventh Assignment:

Contents:

  1. Group project: Automate the machine
  2. project development
  3. My contribution to the group
  4. Selft evaluation
  5. File download

Requirement:

  1. cardboard
  2. four stepper motor
  3. Gestalt Kit

For this group assignment our group have to automate the 4 Axis CNC milling machine

Group project

Group goals:

  1. Programming the CNC machine
  2. Do tests
  3. Design and programming a GUI on Raspberry pi
  4. Milling a piece

Tecsup team:

  1. Armando Sarco
  2. David Maita
  3. Midori Nuñez
  4. John Lozano
  5. Diego Cerrón
  6. Monica Copaja

For this assignment we continue with our fantastic work group


project development

You can check the development of our machine in our group page


For this group assignment, I used Gestalt and implement a GUI over python and rasberry pi 2

What is gestalt?

Gestalt is a set of tools that allow you to automate machines, through PCBs called nodes which are programmed in C and these in turn are connected to the virtual machines programmed in Python, the great advantage of gestalt is that it allows you a Large number of nodes in our case "axes" of our machine, Gestal is based on the thesis of Ilan Ellison Moyer


My contribution to the group

I used the program for gestalt from Ilan Moyer´s repository, and also used the GUI wxFormBuilder v3.1.70 to develop and programing our own user interface.


The first step to do the GUI is installed all programs and complements for the wxFormBuilder, this components are for windows platform, once you finish you GUI, you can copy the .py archive to the raspberry directory of gestalt


Now we open the wxFormbuilder and create a project


Then we create our buttons and interfaces, wxFormbuilder works very well with tables, rows and columns, so we have to define how to locate each button and indicator.
Finally we generated the InterfaceGestal.py file


Our file is in the following address "\gestalt\pygestalt-master\examples\machines\htmaa" and you have to run the InterfaceGestal.py file and load any .nc test files, all archives are in the download section.




Our program load the .nc archive and run the gestalt nodes


The GUI are based in the Ilan Moyer program, we do a easy platform to load archives with the x,y,z,k coordinates and send this to the gestalt boards



I controlled the for stepper motors alone with gestalt and with our own user interface, also I did many tests with our user interface and 4 axis CNC milling machine, for the test we choose a hard foam for milling


Selft evaluation

  1. What worked:
    • We can controller well with the Raspberry pi 2 and our own user interface.

  2. What did not work:
    • The machine sometimes ran slowly because the program needed more capacity from the Raspberry pi 2.

  3. Things to improve:
    • We have to use a more powerful Raspberry pi, and improve our GUI for convert archives like stl or G code to CNC coordinates.

File download