G-Codes vs. CAM / CNC Forums

[LauraN]

Originally Posted by nobrakes8

I'm just curious, in robotics, what do you guys use CNC/CAM for? I major in Tool and Die makeing at my school and I was pretty much taught that CNC is only good for makeing like 10 or 15 or more of the same part. I found in robotics their wasn't really much reason to use CNC because the most I made was 2 or 3 of the same thing.

I don't think my team has every actually used CNC in robotics, but we did kick around the idea of using it for our electronics control panel. Sounds crazy, but basically, we wanted to make our own custom control panel. Instead of using the buttons on the joystick, we added our own rocker switches to our little control box to operate the pneumatics. The problem we ran into is that those rocker switches have a very, very small lip of maybe a few hundredths of an inch. If you make the hole too small, you have to go back and keep enlarging it, but then as soon as you overshoot, the switch will fall right through.

We ended up just using a dremel and spending what felt like half our lives filing the edges until we got to the right size. But the idea was that we could have used a caliper to get exact measurements and then written some CNC that would cut out holes the exact size we needed. So in robotics I think you could use CNC to make very precise cuts where you don't trust human hands to be as accurate as is necessary.