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Heroes of Open Source - David Forsyth & SketchUCam

Heroes of Open Source - David Forsyth & SketchUCam

OpenBuilds Hero of Open Source

In the Open Source Community, it's all about sharing freely. Open Source lives bravely where collaboration and innovation meet. Those who revel in the transparency spend countless hours in the workshop testing out new ideas, giving out advice, and getting input from others in the community. For some pioneers, their work lives on to become the foundation of many other projects. This propels the Open Source community forward to generate more builds, more projects, new innovation & bigger, better ideas. Those that give so much but ask for so little in return are truly interested in helping others through Open Source.  In this series you will meet some of these heroes and learn a bit about their contributions to the Open Source community.  You'll see that these are no ordinary builders, they are the HEROES OF OPEN SOURCE!



OpenBuilds Recognizes David Forsyth and SketchUCam

SketchUcam


THE BEGINNING

My father was an amateur radio operator and built many of his own radios, and most of his antennas. He was a radio operator during WW2, captured at Tobruk. I caught the building bug from him and built many small electronic gadgets as well as mechanical stuff. I learned to use the lathe and mill at his workplace and that is why I now have a lathe. After leaving school and doing the compulsory 2 years of conscripted military service as a radio and telex operator I had the opportunity to go to University. I had no idea what to do, so I chose some subjects that looked interesting. Among them was Computer Science. The first lecture was a revelation! I became a programming geek that very hour.

My first job was programming embedded systems for testing and manufacturing machines in the motor industry. This was in the days of MSDOS when PC's were as fast as Arduinos! One of my co-workers was contracted to produce a CNC controller system and I helped him with the graphics preview code. This was my first brush with CNC and it made no impression at all at the time. Having purchased a lathe in 2000 I started reading around the topic of machining and came across the idea that it might be possible to build a simple CNC router. I looked at EMC (now LinuxCNC) and TurboCNC (runs under DOS) and experimented with those systems. I still have a half finished mechanism made from dot matrix printer frames. The biggest problem at that time was the cost of stepper drivers, now largely solved by the DRV8825 and similar drivers. Half Finished! That would be because I have (had) other interests along the years. Photography, power kiting, model railways and presently radio control aircraft and Arduino programming.

PIONEERING

In early 2013 I once again took up the CNC reigns, beginning by researching software. While trying out the Phlatscript I discovered a bug or two and thought 'I can fix that'. I released that fix as a series of improvements I called 'TruePlunge', because the main fix was to correct the use of the plunge feed rate during plunge moves. The other major fix was in vertical Y motions that sometimes got skipped when they really were needed. Once I had started I could not stop having ideas for additions and improvements.

On the hardware side I have been experimenting with Arduino's, for both CNC and other projects. GRBL is some very impressive software and has lured me away from LinuxCNC though that will still be my controller for more than 3 axes (until GRBL supports rotary axes of course!). Other Arduino projects include a recently completed 'dawn alarm clock' that fades in a strip of LED's to fake the dawn. This is because I have great difficulty waking up in the dark! The next project will monitor the household current draw and turn off the water heater when the draw gets too high. This is to solve 2 problems: the electricity price is climbing and we only have a 30amp main breaker (220 volts), so turning on a kettle and the microwave when the water heater is on will almost instantly switch the entire house off. The idea is that the Arduino will be quicker to turn the water heater off thus preventing the breaker tripping.

SketchUCam

Since the original Phlatscript programming team had faded away I discussed releasing an entire new version with Mark Carew and SketchUCam 1.0 was born! Since then I have been adding features (and stomping on my bugs) with some regularity. The latest release features simple laser control since LED lasers are now relatively cheap. So what does adding a new feature to SketchUCam look like? It starts with either my idea or need, or a question from a user that sparks an idea. For example, my daughter asked me to make some picture frames for a friend. Her drawing showed a chamfered ridge. While I found it easy enough to produce G-code for the ridge, in order to simulate it in CAMotics I needed a tool change command. I added it manually a couple of times, got tired of that, so added tool change to SketchUCam. With this kind of thing the initial programming might take a very short time, maybe 30 minutes to get the basics working. After using it for a while, doing some Googling and discussing the feature with the beta team, adjustments and additions to the new feature may take many more hours. Once the feature is working as intended, I start on the help. This part often takes longer than the programming!

WHAT IS NEXT

I really, really need to finish building my Nguni/OX! Though I do have access to a larger CNC router I really need one 'in-house'. I have been focusing on the latest SketchUCam release which has taken time away from actually building (over and above the usual household maintenance etc.). Here in South Africa many of the things you can easily get from Lowes are simply not available so I am making many of the basic parts myself. For example, M5 bolts are only available in 2 lengths, 25mm and 70mm, so I have had to make a lot of custom lengths to fit the Nguni. However, as soon as that is complete... well, I do have some ideas, like drag knives, right angle router heads, more universal laser control options, adaptive pocketing and improving 3D cutting.

  About the Author

OpenBuilds is proud to have David on staff as a moderator for OpenBuilds.com. David resides in Grahamstown, South Africa with his lovely wife, 3 children and 2 grandchildren. When he is not building, you can find David flying RC airplanes.....and dreaming.

David the swarfer           SketchUCam DOWNLOAD and more information

Jul 22nd 2016 OpenBuilds Team with David Forsyth

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