5-axis CNC Tool center management

[nraynaud]

Hi all, I am in the information phase for a 5 axes machine, and I was wondering what's the status around tool center management.

For people not in the know, the idea for a swinging spindle is that when we incline a tool, we need to raise the Z accordingly to keep the tool tip at the same position wrt. the part (and it gets worse from there, because feedrate and accelerations are computed at the tool tip). That means the Machine knows it own kinematics, and that there is a solid way to calibrate it: measure the distance between the various centers of rotation and tell the controller about it. It's like radius cutter comp, but on steroid and at tool center.

Do you know any open source controller that does that? is there interest in trying to add that to reprap?

Are there other keywords I should look for in google?

Thanks,

Nico.

edit: after looking a bit harder, I found out that linuxCNC seems to support this kind of things by heavy configuration: https://forum.linuxcnc.org/10-advanced-configuration/31813-tcp-5-axis-kinematics?start=120#139881 I leave the link here, in case a google wanderer flies by.

[roiki11]

@nraynaud

What that needs in the machine is inverse kinematics of the machine to Calculate the positions for a given tool center point position. No open source controller currently does this properly, though linuxcnc has it on experimental basis.