An introduction to CAM Software. DeskProto（介绍CAM软件。）.pdf

An introduction to CAM Software. Lex Lennings, May 2001. 1. Historical perspective of CAM. CNC milling machines have of course been developed based on conventional milling machines, where the tool is moved through the material by operating a hand wheel for each of the available axes (X, Y, Z, ...). The basis of adding NC (Numerical Control) is very simple: replace the hand wheel by a positioning motor and add some electronics (the NC controller) to control the position. Nowadays many conversion kits are available to perform such operation. The first NC controllers were very simple: no user-interface, just an option to read the tool- positions to go to from a punched tape. Very soon new controllers were introduced, including a simple computer with a special-purpose keyboard and a display. The operator now could enter the sequence of movements to make (the NC program) on the controller, which was called CNC (Computerized Numerical Control). In some cases a tape puncher / reader still was available for external storage. Next step was of course to use a PC for external storage, communicating with the CNC controller via a serial cable. This allowed the operator to conveniently sit at his desk to enter a new NC program, while at the same time the CNC machine was executing a previous job. Do note that for most desktop machines the situation is a bit different, as here a PC is used for the CNC controller (much cheaper than a special purpose control computer). In the situation just described the operator enters the complete NC program on the computer, using a plain editor like Notepad or a special purpose NC editor. Each movement has to be separately entered, like G0X10Y20Z30 for Machine in a straight line from the current position to position (10,20,30). This is of course very labor intensive, and this is where CAM software comes in to automatically generate NC program files. 2. The position of CAM Software in the process. In order