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.