Quote Originally Posted by Robin Hewitt View Post
So if someone wanted to rip off all your good work and build one of these things to play with, what do they have to do? I am a long way from Bristol.
Interesting question, but probably not a relevant one. As has already been suggested and discussed, what we have is by way of a working prototype. Yes, it does work. However, if any of the team felt motivated enough to build another, it would use some of the same principles and key bits of technology, but probably wouldn't look that much like the one we have. By the same token, no-one in their right mind would want to make an exact copy of what we have built. That's exactly the same reason that I, or many other members of this forum, wouldn't bother to publish plans of their CNC router or whatever because the majority of people don't want to build a copy, they have their own ideas that they want to contribute. There are common basic principles but the application of them can and probably will differ for each machine builder. Despite many pleas for "publish a design that anyone can build!", it ain't happened yet and probably won't. Same for our wire EDM machine. No point in publishing details as someone skilled and experienced enough to build one of these would want to change a lot of it. Look at the number of threads on this forum that deal in some way or other with noise and grounding problems with a router. That is dealing with a bit of EMI from a spindle or motor drive pulses, probably an order of magnitude or two below the kinds of EMI when you have digital electronics a few inches away from a spark transmitter and trying to reproduce someone else's design won't necessarily help much with that.

However, there is nothing secret about the working principles here, it's just that there is little point in detailed circuit diagrams designed around what was to hand as much as the ideal components, and the electronics is also tightly coupled to code running in the PIC microcontrollers. Again, nothing secret about the code, it's just that it would be difficult to reproduce in a different environment.

Distance is not an issue as the original design was put together by a team based variously in Aberdeen, South Devon, and various locations in the home counties, often via video-conferencing. I'm happy to discuss any technical points here on the forum or by PM, although the topic is really not mainstream for this forum (the difficult and interesting bits of the project are not directly the CNC stuff, the mechanics of which are trivial) and the wire EDM Yahoo group (plasmaboog) is the place to go for more technical and specialist discussion. That has a number of contributors with strong backgrounds in building and developing wire EDM technology on this kind of small scale. I'm not ducking the issue; I'm just feeling that this isn't the appropriate place to have brought up the topic. But it's here now, it is what it is, warts and all.