Getting work done faster on a CNC machine
I have been playing with CNC machines for a while and one idea of improving their performance came to my mind: what if, like they do with processors, we could add some parallelism to the process to get more work done in the same amount of time? So a multi-core processor will be the analog of a CNC machine with several spindles. As usual, a quick look at the Internet reveals that a "dual-gantry CNC" is not really a new idea as a few videos can be shown on youtube from some commercial units . Interestingly enough, there are just a few cases shown, which makes me think it is either a bad idea or too complex to work properly in most cases. My plan here is to have two gantries that move independently and to follow the RISC approach: I will handle the dependencies in software so I will create to g-code files, each one feeding one of the gantries in a way that both gantries planing contains no collisions. I guess another approach could be to put in place some kind of collision