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What Do Soylents Do?

posted by LaminatorX on Monday March 17 2014, @02:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-story-of-us dept.

buswolley writes:

"Soylents: Concentrated pools of experts, doers, thinkers.

I am a neuroscientist.

What do you do?"

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by mhajicek on Monday March 17 2014, @09:45AM

    by mhajicek (51) on Monday March 17 2014, @09:45AM (#17574)

    I'm pretty sure the dataminers have already looked at my LinkedIn page. For the rest of you; I've been a CNC programmer (I program precision metal cutting machines) for about 18 years. The two years of tech school to get going were pretty cheap, and I've never had trouble finding employment. Lately I've been getting more into Fanuc Macro B, which adds little things like math and flow control to what is otherwise just a sequential list of move commands. When used in conjunction with a measuring probe, I can make the machine adjust roughing passes to the size of the stock to save cutting time, and adjust offsets to control finished feature sizes. It's also useful for engraving serial numbers and for procedurally generating families of parts (similar parts but with different dimensions).

    As a hobby I've been making medieval style armor for over 20 years.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by sl4shd0rk on Monday March 17 2014, @10:47AM

    by sl4shd0rk (613) on Monday March 17 2014, @10:47AM (#17623)

    I've been a CNC programmer

    Personal projects are a nice side benefit of that job ;)

  • (Score: 1) by timbim on Monday March 17 2014, @01:47PM

    by timbim (907) on Monday March 17 2014, @01:47PM (#17721)

    I dont understand. From my limited experience, I saw that Solid Works outputs some file that the CNC machine can read and get all the information for cutting the metal. What is it that you do in this process? I ask because I want to do what you do but I want job security. Thanks.

    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday March 18 2014, @08:49AM

      by mhajicek (51) on Tuesday March 18 2014, @08:49AM (#18040)

      Solidworks is a Computer Aided Design (CAD) system which helps you make a computer model of a 3D object. It can also model assemblies and do motion studies, stress analysis, and flow simulation. By itself it cannot talk to a CNC machine, but it can save your model in STL format which is the most common input format for a 3D printer. The 3D printer's software then figures out the nozzle path.

      Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) software is for generating the G-Code that CNC machines read (it can also be laboriously written by hand as in the old days). Mastercam is the most commonly used CAM, and also has basic CAD functionality. There are CAM add-in packages for Solidworks.

      The CAM software can't just look at the part and know how to make it. You need to tell it what size and shape of stock you're starting with, how the part is oriented, what cutters to use and at what feed rate, RPM, depth of cut, step-over, etc. That's where the CNC programmer comes in. Usually someone who's done manual machining and CNC operation for a while, the CNC programmer needs to come up with an efficient strategy to hold and machine the part, and communicate that to the CAM software.