In the latter part of 2021 I began to design in my head and on scratch paper a brand new and complete production line for our industrial wood products. Throwing out everything that we have learned over the past 20 years of manufacturing our products and starting with a blank slate and complete freedom in the design and implementation of this new production line I had a few simple goals in my head. Those goals were to reduce our reliance on lower skill employees (that often injured themselves do to simple carelessness or from repetitive motion handling heavy items), reduce the overall labor cost and increase our production capacity by 200-300%. (Don’t worry those employees will be reassigned to different tasks that are required prior to the product entering this new production line.)
In my design each of the many machines accomplishes a relatively simple task. Machine #6 was however a control nightmare as the coordinated motions required logic that was beyond what I cared to implement with typical PLC ladder logic. I reached out to Keith about the AcornSix that was in development and beta testing phase as a solution to my need for more than the 4-axis motion available in the standard Acorn. I had used the Acorn a few years back when I designed and built a 5x10 CNC Plasma table with rapid speeds greater than 3500IPM. I worked with Keith in the early stages of Centroids development of the Plasma version of the CNC12 software before moving on to a job with a different company. I had enjoyed working with Keith and seeing as I tend to do things that are a little out of spec with what manufactures design their hardware to do, I knew that I would have a good partner in Centroid on this project.
Simply having a CNC control was not enough for me. I needed something more integrated than that. This is where I was introduced to the CNC Skinning API and soon came to realize that the power of it was my answer. I began by writing a windows application to act as a translation mechanism to communicate between the Allen Bradley PLC and CNC12. Shortly after I had written a simple application (which only took a few hours), I decided to take it a step further and push some of the CNC12 VCP functions out to the HMI. Running for over a year now the machine is all i had hope it to be. I created my own CNC12 screens to meet my application specifically. The custom CNC12 screens i made make running the machine from the operator stand point very simple, the machine makes the same family of parts with some dimensional differences so the operator simple enters the basic data needed and CNC12 runs a macro g code program that uses that dimensional data. No cad/cam, no g code editing, no g code creation by the operator, it is all automatic. I would love to post a video of the machine in action but i don't want my competitors to see what i have done, i'm probably already posting too much.
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