This New Control Approach Could Take Over Hobby CNC Machining

High-end industrial VMCs (Vertical Machining Centers) often run proprietary software with all kinds of nifty tricks that make daily operations more convenient. If you don’t believe me, spend an hour browsing the FANUC catalog to see what you’re missing out on. But us lowly hobbyists have to rely on fairly basic g-code and control software. To dramatically improve the situation, Joerg Beigang went back to the drawing board to invent a whole new approach to CNC software.

If you do hobby CNC milling on a three-axis machine, you probably follow this workflow: model in CAD, create toolpaths in CAM, export g-code, load g-code in your machine’s control software, set the origin, and press “go.” While that works just fine and has been proven over several decades of real-world use, it has serious limitations. In particular, it doesn’t give you much flexibility to make changes to the job within the control software.

For example, your software likely lets you increase spindle speed up to, say, 150% of the set value. But it won’t let you alter the toolpaths. It probably won’t even let you reorient the toolpaths. If you want to make any real changes, you have to go back to the CAM step — or maybe even the CAD step.

Beigang’s software, called nChips, changes all of that. It borrows a lot of concepts from conversational CNC programming systems, as well as manual machining workflows. The goal being to allow for maximum flexibility right there at the machine.

It does that by treating everything as an object you can manipulate. When you important g-code, the job itself is an object. And each toolpath in that job is an object, too. As objects, they have parameters you can tweak.

To understand why that’s so powerful, let’s consider a hypothetical job. You plan to use a rectangular piece of stock with the long side along the X axis, as is typical. So, you orient it that way in CAM. Then, when you get to the machine, you realize that won’t work — your toolpath is going to cause a collision with the vise.

Normally, you would have to go back to CAM, modify the setup, and regenerate all of the toolpaths. But with nChips, you can simply rotate the toolpaths 90 degrees to avoid the collision.

That’s just scratching the surface, as a lot more is possible, too. You can, for instance, adjust the step-down or step-over between passes. Or change the feed for a specific operation.

So, what’s the catch? Well, I don’t know any more than what I’ve already told you, as Beigang hasn’t released additional details yet. So, it may not work as well as advertised. On top of that, nChips is meant for machines the run GRBL. That will exclude many of us.

But if you do have a GRBL-based machine, nChips is something to keep an eye on.