PERSONALROBOTICS
UNDERSTANDING, DESIGNING & CONSTRUCTING ROBOTS & ROBOTIC SYSTEMS
■ BY VERN GRANER
■ FIGURE 1.
The PROBOTIX
FireBall V90
CNC router.
THE PROBOTIX FIREBALL
V90 CNC ROUTER
IN THIS MONTH’S ISSUE, WE CONSTRUCT
THE PROBOTIX FireBall V90 CNC router from a
kit and then put it through its paces.
TEA. EARL GREY. HOT.
Jean Luc Picard of Star Trek fame
had high tech replication gadgets at
his disposal. In his Utopian sci-fi
future, these devices would be so
common that they were used for
such mundane tasks as making a cup
of tea in the captain’s quarters.
Although we have a long way to go
before we can expect any item we
ask for to pop into existence from a
wall-mounted gadget, some intrepid
folks are diligently working in that
direction, starting with automating
the creation of parts.
When building things both
robotic and mundane, I’ve found
myself sanding, cutting, shaping,
bending, and otherwise changing the
physical shape of some item used in
a project. In many cases, creating
exact duplicates of a part is critical to
making something that balances or
requires matching or aligned holes.
Creating these things by hand can be
rather time-consuming. It sure would
be nice if I could just draw what I
needed and then have a device that
would cut the part for me. Though
not exactly up to the “replicator”
on Star Trek, if automatic part-making
sounds interesting to you, then a
CNC machine is a pretty good
place to start.
I SEE, CNC!
CNC or Computer Numeric
Control is an acronym that refers to a
tool that can cut or shape by using
computer generated instructions (see
the sidebar for a bit of history). Most
CNC machines have a number of
axes and a tool of some sort that can
be guided by a computer to very
precisely remove material. Originally
created in the 1940s for the automation of large-scale manufacturing
(Figure 2), CNC has become more
capable over the years and has made
its way down to small desk top
fabrication systems. Though some
small-project CNC systems are
available to the hobbyist, most are in
the multi-thousand
dollar range so they
haven’t seen much
widespread adoption in
the humble homebrew
market. Until someone
can get the price down
to sub-thousand dollar
levels, we probably
aren’t going to see
many of these tools on a typical
hobby workbench.
BRINGING DOWN THE
PRICE
I was having lunch with long-time
Robot Group member and good
friend Paul Atkinson at Pok-e-Jo’s
BBQ restaurant here in Austin, TX
where we were munching BBQ and
talking tech while the electric train
circled the dining room (see The
TrainSaver, Nuts & Volts, July ‘06).
Paul mentioned that he had recently
read about a new CNC machine
from PROBOTIX that seemed to have
finally managed to break the $1,000
■ FIGURE 2. A CNC
turning center in the
FAME Lab in the
Leonhard Building at
Penn State. (c) 2005
Nathaniel C. Sheetz.
December 2008 69
