Hello all. I am thinking of building a 3d printer with a rotating head,

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Hello all.

I am thinking of building a 3d printer with a rotating head, dragknife type. It would be a machine with 4 axes, with the peculiarity that the fourth axis keeps the head oriented in the forward direction.
Does anyone have experience with these types of applications? Where can I find a cnc driver with the ability to handle that 4th axis? Professional type.

I have looked in omron but the fourth axis can not make the turn of the aplication head.

The work area is 2000x1500x800 mm and the weight of the head is 6 kg.

All ideas will be welcome.

Thanks in advance.

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I have no personal experience with such a unique setup myself. But I have seen machines with some very novel kinematics that run LinuxCNC. Which I believe supports 9 axis out of the box. It is some arbitrary ridiculously high number like that. I still imagine you’re going to have to create some custom code yourself to do exactly what you want. If I were you I’d join their forum and ask them there for some guidance. https://forum.linuxcnc.org/

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BOSCH Rexroth MTX Micro maybe?

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Are you looking for something that runs the G-code? something that generates the G-code? Something that actually pushes signals to the motors?

For instance, Fusion360 with a custom post processor a machine with two parallel ports, a PDMC breakout board and any servo/stepper driver will do what you want.

So will Solidworks (again with a custom post processor) a machine with MESA boards again will drive any servo/stepper drivers you want.

So, what do you mean as a ‘CNC driver’ ?

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@Wes_Devauld LinuxCNC supports MESA too. http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Mesa_Cards

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Mach3 has tangential knife control. It will move your knife in the direction of cut with a stepper motor.

Look up Tangential knife controller for other more professional controllers

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@Jim_Fong the latest OS Mach 3 will run on is 32 bit Windows 7. So I think that disqualifies it as a viable software solution today. If it ever qualified.

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@Paul_Frederick That is up to the end user to decide if is it appropriate for their machine controller needs. I’m just giving a workable solution for Tangential knife control since it is already built into Mach3 with no extra gcode modifications necessary.

There are other higher cost solutions such as WinCNC that support Tangential knife. Again that is for the OP to decide. The keyword was “Tangential Knife” and that is what the OP wants. He may not of known that.

Mach3 only requires 32bit Windows 7 if you use the built in parallel port. If you use a external pulse gen board, than a newer version can be used. That is dependent on the pulse generator board windows driver compatibility. Plenty of manufacturers still support their hardware with Mach3.

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@Paul_Frederick I think that linuxcnc
It’s very complicated for me. The idea is buy a complet box to drive the 4 axys.
Anyway I have installed linuxcnc on my laptop to test it.

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@Frank_Howard thanks. Cound be a possibility. Next week I going to ask for it. Take note.

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@Tecnicos_Cramix laptops are poor hardware to try to run real time OS on. It has to do with the power management that laptops do.

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@Wes_Devauld I want a cnc control to run the Gcode. The code was generated by other software, Winpc-nc.

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@Jim_Fong I am looking for something more industrial, like https://industrial.omron.eu/en/products/nj5--
But it is descarted because , at this momento it does not support tangentials movements with 4º axe.

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@Paul_Frederick thanks for the advice.