Hi! This is my first post here. Thanks for having me as a guest. My boss is hoping that he will be able to attach a heat-gun to an OpenBuilds ACRO positioning system. I'm talking about a handheld heatgun that you could buy at a hardware store. The kind you might use for removing paint or heating shrinkwrap tubing and stuff like that. The idea is that the positioning system would sweep the heat-gun across a flat 15"x15" workpiece surface automatically. We are up for doing some extra work and putting some money into it to make it happen. It doesn't have to be pretty. The exact application of the proposed machine is confidential because we make a unique custom product. My boss has found that the forced air of a heat gun is superior to other options and he likes that it can be directed at a small area only, if he wants. It accomplishes the job without scorching stuff that he doesn't want scorched. We do have several larger, expensive industrial machines that seem like they would work better, but they are just not working out. We currently have employees running heat guns all day. Please tell us how you would go about accomplishing this build, if you were going to do it yourself. Tell us if you think it's possible and share your ideas of how we would go about making it happen. We need to know what software and hardware we would use and things like that. My boss loves to build machines. There are a couple of his projects around our facility. Things he built for $700 that would have cost him $30K if he had bought a commerical product. He is excited about the possibilities of open hardware but he doesn't have any experience using products from OpenBuilds. Thanks for reading my post! We look forward to reading your replies.
I'd also like to add that we can very easily move the workpiece underneath the ACRO so we dont really have to worry about turning the heatgun on and off. It could just run constantly.
Without knowing anything about the application, help may be limited, but you pretty much have two options, once you've connected the heatgun to your assembled ARCO structure: 1) Write a simple g-code program that follows the path you want and create a way to loop it forever. All of your industrial controls can be tied to the I/O in the firmware. 2) Write a simple Arduino program that does the same thing without all the overhead of the interpretation firmware. E-stop would be tied to an interrupt pin, you may have serial comms, etc. Actually, one more option, for a higher-volume production version: 3) Write the simple Arduino program, but instead of an x axis, you build a conveyor, allowing you to feed the system from a single location and potentially batch-process with a magazine. Sort of along the lines of the CarveWright. So you'd have steppers on the conveyor and then a single-axis gantry instead of a whole ARCO rig.
