CNC machine tending, now with accessible robotics for rapid R&D prototyping and specialty manufacturing runs - The Robot Report

By Robot Report Staff | May 1, 2024

Sponsored by Tormach

In 2001, Tormach was founded by “two guys in a garage” who aimed to make small-yet-capable CNC mills affordable, thereby empowering people like themselves who wanted to make things but lacked big corporate budgets to do so. Today, the Madison, Wisc.-based, employee-owned firm has a global customer base for its broad CNC machine and tooling lines. Recently, Tormach introduced its new 1500MX CNC mill that can be operated with the ZA6 industrial robot via the company’s free and open source PathPilot® control software.

CEO Daniel Rogge, once Tormach’s lead controls software engineer with a machinist background, talks about how this CNC-robot combination can enable automated machine tending as a step toward “lights-out” manufacturing for specialty manufacturers, the R&D prototyping by larger manufacturers, and potentially even shop classes and university researchers.

What is lights-out manufacturing and who are the Tormach customers who would use it?

The phrase describes fully automating production runs of machined goods, so no one is needed to oversee the CNCs producing them. While the cost, cycle-time, and quality benefits are many, truly lights-out production has historically been limited to large manufacturers. What we’ve done with our new 1500MX CNC Mill and ZA6 robot is to scale machine tending for use by specialty part producers, who are among our largest customer segment. Our earliest customers were hobbyists and metalworking enthusiasts for whom our founders were building an ”everyman” CNC milling machine. Today, we still consider them an important part of our user community, but many of our newer customers are growing commercial enterprises as well as schools and universities, where Tormach machines are a great fit for affordable rapid prototyping and machining R&D.

What sets Tormach’s machines and tooling portfolio apart from what other companies offer?

Tormach’s founders aimed to make CNC mills both affordable and highly capable, with rigid frames and able to meet tight tolerances. They also had to be compact enough to fit through standard doorways and hookup to standard single-phase outlets, so three-phase power or phase converters weren’t necessary. Modular and user-serviceable designs are also hallmarks of Tormach CNC machines, making them expandable and easy to own. Essentially what Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did to make computing affordable, capable and accessible, our founders did for hobbyists and small metalworkers. From there, Tormach has evolved to where we are today.

How does Tormach differ as a company from other CNC machine and robot vendors?

For starters, we sell direct, so we offer our customers hard-to-beat value for their investments, without intermediaries marking up our equipment or systems integrators charging huge fees for setups and even more for changes and upgrades. And, as an employee-owned company, everyone at Tormach has a stake in supporting and servicing each customer’s needs, so each day we can earn their trust, referrals, and future business.

Early on, we also made our easy-to-learn, easy-to-use PathPilot control software that’s based on Python programming open source and free, with free upgrades for life. Complementing that is our free, cloud-based PathPilot HUB that lets our users edit and test their G-code by simulating their Tormach machines and securely sync’ing their files for any of those machines in the cloud. Our user forums are another way we support the user community.

Tell us about the ZA6 industrial robot arm. How can it take your customers’ operations to the next level?

The ZA6 has lit up our user community with its potential for automated welding and machine tending. Most robot makers use proprietary, closed-source software and control systems for their manipulators that cause the many “black-box” issues that plague modern robotics applications. To enable the ZA6 to connect and interwork with our Tormach milling machines like the 1500MX we just introduced, our engineers used Python and ROS (Robot Operating System) development to create an intuitive programming interface for its robot motion. This enables 10 digital inputs and 12 outputs, so in real time users can monitor positioning, timing, velocity, and path accuracy intents, as well as motor torque and amperage data.

Research institutions are using the ZA6 in interesting ways, like the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that’s using the robot arm in their 3D metal additive work cell. They’re studying 3D-printed welds microscopically with beams of neutrons to better understand factors such as stress caused by heating and cooling. For specialty part makers, the ZA6 is efficient enough to be a solid investment for the shop creating 500,000 units of one thing and flexible enough to also make sense for the shop making 10,000 units of many different things.

How will Tormach’s new 1500MX expand the capabilities and options available to your growing user community?

Our 1500MX CNC mill is the most capable machine we’ve ever built. Blindingly fast and extremely accurate, it’s a 3-axis, servo-driven mill on linear rails that delivers the higher performance, power, responsiveness, and technology our users need to stay competitive both in terms of efficient yet high-quality throughput via faster feed rates and greater precision and optimized production costs. Its U.S.-made, epoxy-granite frame provides ten times the damping of cast iron, which ensures chatter-free cuts, great surface finishes on every run, and a much longer tool life, about 30% longer, in fact.

How will the expanded networking of Tormach machines and tooling help boost machinist productivity even more?

With PathPilot, Tormach machines can now be networked securely, wirelessly, and without unintended motion control problems. We want to make the milling process less about communication errors, file transfer issues, and bogged-down controllers, all to bring it back to enabling our customers to create, test, and realize their ideas as quickly and easily as possible.

For example, networking enables the tight integration of the ZA6 robotic arm with our 1500MX and 1100MX CNCs, so researchers, R&D groups, and specialty producers can try out automated machine tending with little risk. It also facilitates rapid prototyping by letting R&D engineers port their designs directly from their CAD/CAM apps and also test their G-code in the PathPilotHUB cloud. And, for Tormach machines that are appearing as second operations machines in larger factory environments, they can be easily incorporated into PDM (Production Documentation Management) strategies as part of QA programs, especially ISO 9000-compliant ones.

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Tormach will exhibit at the Automate Show in Chicago, Ill. May 6-9 and invites attendees to visit and watch live demonstrations of its 1500MX CNC Mill integrated with the ZA6 industrial robot arm and learn how automated machine tending can be accessible to smaller manufacturers.