Quote Originally Posted by Kitwn View Post
In amongst making much simpler bits for my wife's weaving and lacemaking I'm slowly working towards a finished design for an electric wooden clock. All the gears are wood and the whole thing is driven by a standard 5V USB wall wart with the precision of a quartz watch. There's a video here which shows an old prototype of the design which is actually locked to a GPS receiver and is therefore as accurate as any clock you can get! Regular readers will have seen this before.

Progress today has been held up by the need to upgrade my CamBam installation to the beta 64 bit version as the standard 32 bit version ran out of memeory trying to plan the trochoidal tool paths for 12 gear wheels (enough for two clocks) to be cut from a single 600x900mm sheet of plywood at once. There are still some other pieces to cut from the sheet but the gear's teeth alone are over 154000 lines of G-code. The one in the video used less code-hungry conventional cutting.

Kit

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/343781598
Hi Kit,

As always, thanks for the response. Like Andy, I was going to say that the link doesn't work for me (perhaps because it includes the management interface?) However, while I'm here....

Nice to see that you helping your wife in these crazy times. My better half is involved with making soaps, so I've been making easy-to-release moulds, soap cutters, and various 3D printed textures to "stamp" into the cakes of soap. However, with our backyard/front yard/available space orchard, and berries everywhere, I seem to build more shelving for preserved harvests than anything else.

Regarding the CamBam, as an IT tech support guy, I feel like I need to understand. Did you mean that the memory running out is the bit that has delayed you by interrupting the cut? I can't imagine that the upgrade itself would take you long. I'd be intrigued to see just how complex a tool path would have to be to overwhelm a 32 bit system.

If there's a log on CamBam, would it be feasible to find out where the machine got up to in the G-code, and perhaps?continue on with the remainder? ( I'm completely new to CNC, so if the machine simply stopped, that might be an option. However, I am assuming that a memory issue will simply stop the machine. Is this what happens? Worst case... I assume many hobbyists would just start again with a new work piece. If so, I hope it wasn't too painful for you.

With the gears for your clock, are they the standard 2d gears? (no tapered worm drives or anything like that) that would probably need a four (or more) axis machine. Do you use the trochoidal milling technique to get particularly large gear teeth (or grooves), or is there some sort of "feeds and speeds" benefit?

I'm terribly sorry to bombard you, but I've been focusing on building the machine rather than how it'll go once constructed. I guess I'll jump off that bridge when I come to it, but a little "heads up" might be helpful if you're willing. :~)

As always, take care and have fun!
Harmo.