[HH] update on Othermill

[Drew Van Zandt]

Based just on the design, they won't want to show it milling aluminum in
any marketing videos.  It will be very, very slow.  (I've spent half my
evenings for the past two months milling aluminum, I have a really good
feel for how tooling interacts with it now.)  The machine pictured lacks
the design stiffness needed for carving up aluminum at any speed other than
dead slow.

Regarding the software, the pro software like Solidworks/HSMWorks does the
on-screen simulation.  A "stock simulation" will show you exactly what the
final product will look like, barring issues like overstressing and
breaking tools because you didn't pay attention to feed speeds or shock
loading at transitions.

*
Drew Van Zandt
Cam # US2010035593 (M:Agapito Acosta)
Domain Coordinator, MA-003-D.
*


On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 2:28 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro+hhacking at gmail.com> wrote:

> The guys at Tested interview Martine Neider, an engineer from Othermill[1]:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXuTtFx6H7I
>
> I was hoping they'd show a nice demo of one milling some aluminum, but
> they only thing they showed was a PCB being milled. (They showed a bunch
> of items that had been milled previously, mostly things from machining
> wax and the silicone molds made from the wax positives.)
>
> They talk a bit about the CNC routers and milling equipment they use to
> make the Othermill. (They're working out of "Otherlab", which sounds a
> lot like Bolt[2], a hardware startup incubator.)
>
> The interviewer (Will) says he didn't think consumer CNC mills existed
> prior to Othermill. While Othermill might be the smallest and most
> desktop friendly, there have certainly been inexpensive, bench-top CNC
> mills or CNC conversion kits for non-CNC mills dating back many years.
>
> They mention their "Othercam" software, which will consume the
> instructions for your milling projects and run an on-screen simulation
> (including an animated spindle head you can watching moving about) so
> you can see if it will produce the results you want. I'm not sure how
> unique that is.
>
> The company is renaming itself to Othermachine (othermachine.co) so it
> can expand into other desktop CNC machines (I don't think they specified
> what).
>
>  -Tom
>
> 1. Mentioned previously on the list:
> http://www.mail-archive.com/hardwarehacking@blu.org/msg00927.html
>
> 2. http://www.mail-archive.com/hardwarehacking@blu.org/msg00910.html
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