Arcdroid plasma cutter

[David Champion]

This looks like a fun little CNC. Will be interesting to see how good / accurate it is once it's released. I'm a bit skeptical on how that arm will do compared to a traditional CNC Plasma table. 

http://arcdroidcnc.com/

-dc

[Caroline Longnecker]

I’m wondering where they put the box with all the electronics for the plasma cutter itself to work. Unless they have some crazy miniaturization going on, or it’s very low power, I can’t see how all that would fit into the box with the motion control system and electronics.

Caroline

On Sep 29, 2021, at 11:11 PM, David Champion <dcham...@gmail.com> wrote:



This looks like a fun little CNC. Will be interesting to see how good / accurate it is once it's released. I'm a bit skeptical on how that arm will do compared to a traditional CNC Plasma table. 

http://arcdroidcnc.com/

-dc

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[Ray Scheufler]

It looks like there are two boxes.  The "arcdroid" box has all the motion components, you have a separate plasma cutter that you attach to the end of the head.  If you watch the video it is pretty clear that there is a separate plasma cutter box somewhere else that they just strap the cutting head to the end of the effector platform.  Not unlike most home built CNC plasma machines.  I'll note that the claim of "portable to job site" is a bit misleading.  You can see in the gif that there is a plasma cutter in the bed of the UTV as well.  Additionally, plasma cutters require a decent air compressor to work properly.  So your job site already has to be ready to run a plasma cutter before this is useful at all.  Technically possible (there are mobile welders that have all the gear to run a plasma cutter on their truck and are self sufficient) but not just throw this in the trunk and you are good to go.

Assuming that it has the ability to do torch height control, this could be a reasonable machine.  There looks to be a reasonable amount of reinforcement in the arm linkage.  They also claim to have encoder feedback (how they are doing the tracing thing).  A CNC plasma cutter is much closer in rigidity requirement to a 3d printer than it is to a CNC router.  With proper torch height control, there is nothing from the CNC machine touching the work piece, it is just an ark.  I am curious to know the work envelope, you are slightly constrained by the fact that it is working in an arc.  The motion control math is a bit harder because you nominally want to have coordinates in XY space but you have to achieve that by a pair of angles.  Not the hardest math in the world, but an extra layer of complication.

Ray Scheufler

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[Caroline Longnecker]

I had similar thoughts. I didn't have time to watch the video, so I only saw the title card and the gifs. Looking at the gif, it seems the idealized version has a vertical torch, rather than the horizontal hand torch in the video, and the cables coming from the torch head looked to head towards the main box iirc, and I thought that was pretty misleading.

I had a similar opinion on the "portability" aspect. You could use a portable compressor, but if you're doing a sizeable amount of cutting, you'd probably wear out smaller tank compressors due to over cycling them. If you're using a bigger tank, then id question the whole portability aspect.

I'm a little skeptical about their "inexpensive" claim, what with the encoder feedback being a selling point. I'm my experience, a decent servo-type drive and encoder setup isn't that cheap. I suppose it could just be stepper driven, with the encoders primarily used to do the tracing feature (and maybe used as feedback on the steppers), but that seems like some serious development work for a software solution that may not exist. I know a lot of these companies on indiegogo and Kickstarter love developing their own software anyways.

All that said, it looks kinda neat and handy. I suppose a SCARA-like motion system is probably ideal for balancing portability and work area.

Caroline

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