Development of Integrated CNC-RP System through CAD/CAM Environment

This paper propose to integrate a CNC Machining & Rapid Prototyping in a single system through a CAD/CAM interface. CNC Machining integrate with Rapid Prototyping is a method that has been developed which enables automatic generation of process plans from a geometric image of component. Using existing CAD/CAM software, which is well understood and normally used in machining operations the software developed manipulates the machining code from the ALPHACAM package and generates code and instructions suitable for RP technology. Two user-friendly programs were developed using Visual Basic to generate control code for a wax droplet RP system previously developed. CNC/RP follows the traditional method in RP and generates control instructions for the system from a STL file. The CNC/RP software is designed to generate control instructions for the system to build a prototype from CNC code, generated using ALPHACAM.