Use this method to make your life a bit more productive. When I have setup a job on the CNC machine I used to babysit the machine to make sure nothing bad would happen and a few times I was very glad I was sitting there. Usually it was a mistake that I made which caused issues. However it’s such a waste of time sitting beside a dusty and loud machine but I didn’t feel comfortable leaving it on its own for more than a minute or two. My initial thought was to install an IP camera and just plug it into the network to allow me to keep my eye on what was going on. Once I looked at the cost of an IP camera that idea fizzled out.
My next thought was to use a cheap USB cam but they are limited in distance, the CNC location is about 30 or 40 feet away from the office so that would too far for normal USB. I found these cool Ethernet USB extensions which will allow you to stretch your USB port up to 150 feet away from your computer (I accidentally said 300 in the video but it isn’t quite as long as normal Ethernet can go). Plugging in a cheap web cam into the computer using the Ethernet extender worked great!
Now to make things even more flexible the Yawcam software that I was using has a cool streaming feature, this allows you to setup a port on your computer so that other devices (or computers) on your network can view the stream. All I needed to do was type in the IP address of the laptop into the browser bar of the iPod Touch with the port number and bingo there was the wireless live picture of the CNC in action.
Monitoring the machine with a reassuring glance is so much better than sitting beside it and I am still very close if something needs attention in a hurry.
Items you need to make this work.
