Who has shopped for a FRC CNC machine recently? Any real life experience pros and cons on West Coast Products offering here: Omio CNC & Accessories – WestCoast Products?
I recommend checking out these threads:
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As a team that purchased an Omio X8 2200 a few years ago, I can say that we have been extremely happy with it. It’s a very reliable and easy to use CNC that has upped our production abilities exponentially. The new (larger) Omio MPC 125 looks to be much the same (it has the exact same spindle, for instance) and is a great bargain for the size, though of course it’s brand new and you won’t find any teams that have used it yet. If you do get the X8, be sure to also get the tube fixture for it. Ours has saved us amazing amounts of time in doing any kind of work on tube.
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Is a 30.3” x ~22.2” cutting surface sufficiently large for the many variations of FRC robots? - it is within our budget - and would fit this year’s robot with exception of the belly pan… or will we be kicking ourselves we didn’t hold out for the larger one?
Over 90% of FRC parts can be made on the Omio X8 2200.
That said CNC machines are much like giving a mouse a cookie, as soon as you can make 90% of the FRC parts all you will think about is the less than 10% of parts that are too big for the Omio. And once you get a bigger machine you will lament not having an ATC (automatic tool changer) so on so forth…
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We’ve built robots since 2019 within the constraints of an Omio X8 (or two). It does present some limitations, but that is not wholly a bad thing— for us, we view manufacturing on a sliding scale of cost/time/difficulty. Parts that fit on the Omio are on the lowest end of that after COTS parts that we have in stock, and we try to largely keep our manufacturing there, though we do occasionally need to do some tricks to, for example, machine a tube longer than the Omio’s travel, or find a sponsor to cut a large bellypan (though, honestly, we’ve just done split bellypans, or bellypans that do fit on the robot due to the robot’s size, so that hasn’t been a real issue).
Certainly if you have the space/budget for a similar/better quality larger machine, go for it, but the gap there is basically Omio to something like a ShopSabre, or similar. Be very cautious of machines on the cheaper side that are larger/don’t have linear rails/don’t use ball screws.
We’ve found it to be large enough for pretty much everything except for the bellypan, which we’ve gotten around by making the bellypan as two separate pieces.
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The only thing we haven’t been able to machine on our omio is one piece belly pans and our longest elevator 2x1" tubes. Would highly recommend the omio.
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We’ve been fundraising for several years for a large-format CNC and just ordered an Avid 4’x4’. Very excited.
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We haven’t really had any problems with the size of the bed. We’ve even been able to cut things like large belly pans by dividing them in half (we did that for our 2022 robot and it worked great.) For most things, the size is fine, especially since you can fit 24" wide by any length stock on it, so you don’t actually have to cut things down to get them into the machine. That also means you can work on very long tubes as long as you index them carefully in the tube fixture.
OK - we have purchased and received Omio CNC from WCP…they are SUPER. Any guides / experience to share on SETUP? any/all would be helpful…
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Bob,
Direct link to manual:
This will be converted to gitbooks over the summer so it’ll get a little better.
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We have always used products by Carbide3D we are getting ready to purchase the Shapeoko 5 pro, which has a cut size of 48.7’’ x 48.7’'and a bit setter. We have never had any issues with CNC routers from them and especially at the cost of $3750 for a larger cnc router and free shipping. I can wait to get my hands on our new ones.
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