Neanderpundit

And I’m recovering from a dog and pony show, in which I was both the dog, and the pony.

We got in several machines in the last week, and I am in the midst of doing some impossible shit to them. That’s no big deal, for me, but it’s a cluster because they keep messing with the controls. Which brings me to this:

CNC controls will eventually change, and change dramatically. Right now, NC controls are stable in design (Fanuc, Mitsubishi) or downright stagnant (Okuma, Haas) or paranoid schizophrenic (Siemens, Heidenhain)

The world of control manufacture seems to think that they have to do more and more to sell more new controls, but that’s not the future, at all. The fact is, for the vast majority of CNC machines out there, only a very few functions are needed on the control, and they mostly consist of:

Cycle starting the program
Telling the operator the program is finished
monitoring tool life and tool wear
allowing the operator to change offsets.
Loading the program into memory, retrieving the program from memory.

The first two could be a pushbutton with a light, the rest could be a tiny screen that costs $120. And most manufacturers are busy selling machines with $60,000 worth of CNC panels because they think that’s what will sell machines. It won’t. Most people want a machine that makes a good part when they push the go button. CNC front ends will in short order be an app on an Ipad or android, which is a thousand times more powerful and can be made to do whatever you want and personalized for the individual engineer. Interfaces will allow it to write code for any number of machines. And the engineer/programmer will only have his tablet to carry around, which will have all his data on it. And machines will cost between 20 and 25% less. And still make great parts. Watch this space.

I wrote about this. As I age the people whose lives I celebrate on this day grow fewer and fewer.

Always my favorite, my uncle Calvin, I have written about here before.

War is horrible, and I would not wish it on anyone. I do sometimes wonder if war is not what is needed to awaken people from their slumber, and be the kind of people the Greatest Generation was. I pray that there be another Greatest Generation in our future.

But the end is in sight. The garage/apron project is complete, the work projects are coming under control, and the overflow of Garage stuff is finally finding it’s way back into the garage, so the house is getting cleaner. Well, emptier.

Had to light a fire one day last week to keep the house warm enough for human habitation. Damned if I’m gonna turn the furnace back on.

Eyes, for those who asked, are good. Still have lots of crap floating in my right eye, but most of the time it’s high in my field of vision (Low, image inverted) and only becomes an issue if I jostle my head around. The concern is that I be more likely to yet more retinal damage due to this. I have shot light recoiling rifles since this, (30-06, 45-70) but I have not shot the 500 nitro. I want very much to see a retinologist prior to that, my MD is going to find one who isn’t a hoplophobe to check me out. I do most certainly appreciate your prayers. In matters like this I will take the prayers of the faithful over the vagaries of the medical profession every day.

Speaking of my optometrist, he stopped by the other day with a bit of a Christmas present in June:

Those puppies are 10″ plus wide and 2″ plus thick and about seven feet long. That is my new workbench.

Todays jobs are fluid changes in the vehicles, brakes on the yellow submarine, a few other needful things, and when I’m done with the have-to-get-me-to-work work, I will go back to working on the garage stuff. I need to get the boards edge jointed and possibly glued up, then I can start reassembling things. And that is not all gonna do itself. Have a good one, folks, and thanks again!