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AXYZ is a leading global manufacturer of CNC router machines and knife systems. Designed and built at our state-of-the-art factory in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, AXYZ CNC routers are supplied and supported through a global network of sales and support offices and authorized dealers. Since 1990, AXYZ has developed, programmed and supplied our own control systems for the CNC routers we build as well as for other OEMs around the world. The marriage of the A2MC controller, A2MC Enterprise and AXYZ SmartConsole is critical to the successful implementation of our CNC routers.

Ken Naasz is design and development VP at The Sign Factory (Kirkland, WA).
The Sign Factory (TSF) was awarded the bid for five, solar-powered monument signs at Eastern Washington University (EWU). The jobs included working at a remote site approximately 300 miles from Seattle with weather extremes – a challenge for solar-powered signage. Also, such projects require sophisticated energy consumption and storage components to operate in darkness. And, among other things, the job required extensive excavation and precast-concrete forming and installation.
The beginning
Founded in 1882 as Eastern Washington State College, EWU offers the state’s best public-education value. It’s now Washington’s fastest-growing public institution, with more than 10,000 students, and EWU’s College of Business and Public Administration ranked in the 2011 edition of The Princeton Review’s annual guidebook, The Best 300 Business Schools. The 300-acre, park-like campus is just 17 miles from Washington’s second largest city, Spokane.
The university’s Board of Trustees included the completion and implementation of the Campus Sustainability Master Plan in its goals for the 2010-2011 academic year. The plan specified five, solar-powered, monument signs. Jacobs Engineering’s Environmental Graphic Design Group (EGDG) worked with the facility’s management team on the pioneering green project. George Lim, EGDG’s national creative director, said an LED-lit sign program would consume no power and require less maintenance than traditional signs running on a power grid.
The completed signs were expected to be “carbon neutral” – 100% solar powered and avoiding typical energy consumption. Using Jacobs’ concept designs, TSF engineered, fabricated and installed the sign system. TSF President Jim Risher said experience keyed successful project execution.
Energy savings
The five signs varied in size from 4 x 8 ft. to 22 x 8 ft. TSF value-added the concept design by adding reverse-channel, LED halo lighting to increase the signs’ impact and readability. Equally important, all of the LED lights are powered by 12VDC. The two sign types that comprise granite towers (erected in tandem with cast, concrete monuments) require just a 3A current, and the complementary, horizontal monument signs draw only 2A of current. All told, the signs required approximately 400 linear ft. of LEDs.
This unique, proprietary design eliminated the need for conversion to alternating current to gather and store DC voltage from the sun. For accenting lighting in the concrete-tower monument signs, which were identified in the project as “G1” and “G2,” lamps were recessed into the integral concrete structure. For the other monument signs, referenced as “ID1”, “ID2” and “ID3”, we ground-mounted lamps for uplighting.
We designed the signfaces using Delcam’s Artcam 2009 Express and Gerber Scientific Products’ Composer 3.6 software, and fed the design into AXYZ Toolpath for Windows, our AXYZ 5010 6 x 10-ft., CNC flatbed router’s onboard program. We routed the aluminum background panels and created second-surface channel letters with stainless-steel returns internally lit with white LEDs. We welded the signface’s metal components together with a Millermatic 175 220V, wire-feed welder.
Rock stars
TSF replaced the columns’ original, cultured-stone design with tons of granite to honor the history and granite-stone architecture of the Normal School, an original campus building that had burned down. The site’s original, granite stones now serve as a monument to the Pillars of Hercules in front of Showalter Hall, at the campus’ traditional entryway.
The TSF team partnered with precast companies and masons to construct the huge signs, steps and footings onsite. We secured all the signs above 3 ft. 6 in. deep, concrete pier footings. They needed a solution to provide the signs with solar power during periods of darkness. The solution required a system that used photovoltaic, solar-array panels to gather and store energy.
The company also contracted with solar design and engineering firms to develop the storage mechanism and configure each unique sign location to overcome the obstacles, such as array-panel placement. One sign site required placing the array panel 150 ft. away from the sign, atop an 18-ft. pole. We did this for aesthetic reasons; we didn’t want the solar array to interfere with the sign’s sightlines.
Because the panel was inaccessible to vehicles, the TSF team attached a three-pane panel the size of a sail to the crane. It was very windy on installation day, and we had to wait for the gusts of wind to subside in order to prevent the rope-tethered solar arrays from sailing away like kites.
A photo-electric charger, made by Outback Power Technologies, serves as the signs’ nerve center. Mark Robison, president of Rain City Solar (Arlington, WA) said: “It can sense automatically when to turn lights on and off, and even knows when to charge batteries and when to turn lights off when battery power is low.”
TSF attached the solar-array panels to poles and ran rigid conduit from the solar array down to the electrical-panel box and, subsequently, the signs. Each sign had its own charger.
Onsite construction
The sites were located in remote campus areas near its current signage. Altogether, the TSF team, along with numerous subcontractors, spent 12 weeks onsite to complete the project. The signs’ new construction required existing signs to be demolished.
The sites ranged in size from 0.25 to 0.67 acres. Each site presented numerous obstacles, such as dirt, tree and shrub removal. Between 100 and 150 tons of precast concrete were delivered and hoisted into place. The project required multiple precast caps, with the largest weighing 10 tons.
The two largest monument signs sit atop three or four steps, which were designed to accentuate their presence as monuments. The subcontractor made stamp impressions, which were completed using silicone molds, formed with the pattern Jacobs specified, to create a stone-like look. The TSF team handled the footings and installed four, 8W Lumascape LED lamps in custom housings with tempered-glass caps in each of the G1 and G2 monuments.
TSF contracted with Olympian Precast and Epic Construction for precast and masonry services. Olympian provided casting for the components which made up the linear portion of the monument signs and tower caps. Each sign includes five precast elements; Epic constructed the columns. Once constructed, Epic applied the granite. The TSF team built, assembled and installed large aluminum-composite, rectangular wraps, built with 3A Composites’ Alucobond® material, to the face of each column.
The “G1” wrap measures 19 ft. tall, and “G2” reaches 15 ft. The large, red wraps provide visual enhancements by covering approximately two-thirds of the column faces to match school colors. On the wraps, we identified the founding year of the original Normal School, 1882, with 1-in.-thick, Steel Art (Boston) aluminum letters. The Alucobond material also provides an accent for the monument and tower capstones.
Risher said serving as a general contractor and supervising numerous subcontractors on the EWU project proved challenging. “Normally our operations are centralized,” he said. “This project challenged us to turn our procedures upside down while maintaining our standards of excellence. It consumed more resources than we estimated. We even had to fire a contractor for poor work.”
Despite the project’s challenges, it was still very worthwhile to help an institution of higher learning fulfill its mission to provide an environmentally friendly campus. And, probably most satisfying to all parties involved, we delivered the $429,000 project on time and under budget.
Equipment and Materials
Coatings: Grip-Gard®, two-part, self-etching primer, from Akzo Nobel Coatings (Norcross, GA), (770) 662-8464 or www.signfinishes.com; satin-finish, acrylic-polyurethane paint, from Matthews Intl. (Delaware, OH), (800) 323-6593 or https:corporateportal.ppg.com/na/refinish/matthews
Concrete and Granite: Structural concrete masonry units; natural, stone-cut granite; and precast concrete monoliths, caps and veneers, from Olympian Precast (Redmond, WA), (425) 868-1922 or www.olyprecast.com
Cranes: Dyna-Lift 80-ft. crane, from Dyna-Lift Inc. (Clearwater, FL), (800) 200-0898 or www.dyna-lift.com; Genie 125-ft. lift, from Genie Industries (Redmond, WA), (800) 536-1800 or www.genielift.com; 38-ton crane, from Coast Crane (Spokane, WA), (509) 535-4226 or www.coastcrane.com
LEDs/Lighting: Lumascape LS411LED Omnio Mini and LS793 LED lamps, from Pacific Lamp and Supply (Seattle), (206) 767-5334 or www.pacificlamp.com; Photovoltaic solar electrical components, from Rain City Solar (Arlington, WA), (206) 954-0380 or www.raincitysolarpower.com; red and white, V Series LED modules, from SloanLED (Ventura, CA), (888) 747-4533 or www.sloanled.com
Metal: Recycled-content aluminum sheet, from Ryerson Aluminum (Chicago), (773) 762-2121 or www.ryerson.com; red, 4mm Alucobond® composite material, from 3A Composites (Mooresville, NC), (704) 658-3500 or www.alucobondusa.com; one-in.-thick, waterjet-cut aluminum letters, from Steel Art (Boston), (617) 566-4049 or www.steelartco.com
Router: Dual-head, 6 x 10-ft., flatbed CNC router, from AXYZ Automation Inc. (Burlington, ON, Canada) (800) 361-3408 or www.axyz.com
Software: AXYZ Toolpath for Windows, from AXYZ Automation Inc.; ArtCam Express 2009, from Delcam Inc. (Windsor, ON, Canada), (877) 335-2661 or www.artcam.com; Omega Composer 3.6, from Gerber Scientific Products Inc. (Tolland, CT), (800) 222-7446 or www.gspinc.com
Welder: Millermatic 175 220V wire-feed welder, from Miller Weldmaster Corp. (Navarre, OH), (330) 833-6739 or www.weldmaster.com
More About The Sign Factory
The Sign Factory (Kirkland, WA) manufactures, installs and services electric signs. Jim Risher, president, started in the business as a three-year-old who grew up on the floor of his family’s shop, Northwest Neon and Plastic, which was founded in 1964. Over the years, the Risher family purchased several sign companies, including B&B Sign Co. (Missoula, MT).
In the summer of 1988, as Jim drove to Puget Sound from Montana, he envisioned the need for a company that could design and manufacture signs in-house from start to finish. He says the advantage of the turnkey process is brand consistency and competitive pricing while working on multiple locations.
The company offers wholesale production and project coordination regionally and nationally, as well as in Canada. Major customers include Macy’s, Safeway, Bank of America, Supercuts, Starbucks and Wells Fargo, as well as local architects, retailers, property managers and commercial developers.

VTransfer

VTransfer is a small helper application provided by Vectric to simplify the process of sending toolpaths to some grbl-based controllers. You should run VTransfer on the PC to which your CNC machine is connected via a USB serial connection. If your Vectric CADCAM software is also running on the same PC, you can use Direct Output mode to send toolpaths to VTransfer directly, without the need for file saving or loading.

As well as streaming toolpaths, also VTransfer provides the commands you need to initiate basic homing, jogging and setting of origins on your CNC machine before a toolpath is run.

Getting Started

Before starting VTransfer, you need to ensure that your machine is powered on, any required drivers are already installed and the machine is accessible via a serial port (COM port on Windows). For most machines connected by USB, you will need to have installed the appropriate device driver for your machine controller. These drivers will be provided by your machine tool supplier and you should verify that your CNC machine connects correctly to your PC before attempting to use VTransfer.

When the machine and drivers have been installed correctly, refreshing and checking the drop-down Connect On: list will show your machine tool controller. VTransfer will still need to know the specific communication protocol required though and the first time you use VTransfer you will need to complete some one-time set-up and configuration.

Initial Set-up

Once this initial set-up has been completed VTransfer should automatically detect and connect to your machine on start-up, provided the machine remains connected to the same USB port of your PC. Before connecting to your machine for the first time, however, you should complete the following steps to set the right controller type and maching configuration.

• Select File->Settings from the main menu to open the Settings dialog
• Make sure that your controller is selected in the Controller Name: drop down list (for a grbl version 1.x controller this will be Grbl, for example)
• Select the correct configuration file for you machine, or create your own.

Controller Connection

• Make sure that your machine is connected to the PC via USB and it is powered on
• Click the button regenerate the Connect On: drop down list with all of the detected devices connected to your PC
• Select your controller device from the list - note that this may be the name of the microcontroller on which your controller is running, rather than the controller name itself (grbl may appear as Arduino UNO, for example)
• Check that the Machine Status reported by VTransfer reads Looking for... followed by the expected controller name
• Machine Status will change to Connecting while VTransfer attempts to verify the controller is communicating as expected
• Once correct communication has been established the Machine Status will change to Initialising, Alarm or Ready depending on how your machine is configured

Running a toolpath

Once connected to your CNC machine, the typical steps for running your first toolpath using VTransfer are:

• Open the Jog Tab
• If your Machine Status or unlock your machine (if supported and configured)
• Load your toolpath file or send one to VTransfer via Direct Output
• If required, jog the machine to the location of the material on your CNC machine (to match the relative origin point of your toolpath) and set the
• Fit the required tool
• Either run the Z Touch Plate cycle (if supported) to set Z Zero to match your toolpath
• Or manually jog the tip of the tool to the material surface or machine bed (again to match the Z Zero setting of your toolpath) and set the
• Ensure the spindle is on (if it is not controlled automatically)
• Open the Cut Tab - Click

Sending a toolpath directly to VTransfer from your Vectric software

At the point of saving your toolpath some post-processors support the option of Direct Output to VTransfer (such as the Emblaser or X-Carve). If you have one of these post-processors selected, the Output direct to machine checkbox will be enabled below the post-processor selection box. With this box checked, will change to and clicking this button will automatically send the toolpath to VTransfer. If VTransfer is not already running, it will launch automatically.

Whenever a new toolpath is loaded or received by VTransfer it will prompt you with a message box.

Homing, Jogging and Origins

Axyz Toolpath For Windows Manual

Before running your toolpath it is essential to set your machine's origins appropriately. The specific process you need to use will, to a large extent, will be determined by your machine and its configuration. Generally you will need to home your machine (if supported) and set the X Y origin to match the intendended toolpath and location of the material on your machine's bed. You will also need to fit the correct tool and typically set the tip of this tool to be at Z Zero, either at the top or bottom of your material - again this choice will already have been determined when your toolpath was created. The commands relating to these actions are all available from the Jog tab.

Whenever VTransfer changes its origin settings you will be prompted with a message box.

Start Homing Sequence

Click this button to initiate the homing sequence. The homing sequence will culminate in setting the origins of your machine using its homing switch locations and the machine's machineable area - both of which are set in the configuration. For some controllers (such as grbl) you will typically be required to run this command before you can do anything else because the machine will start-up in a disabled Alarm status.

Z Touch Plate

This button will be visible if your machine is configured with a touch plate, touch plate support is enabled and its thickness is set in the configuration settings. Click it to initiate the Z touch plate probing cycle. Make sure that the touch plate is in position and correctly functioning before clicking this option as it will immediate begin a plunge move.

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Axyz Toolpath For Windows 10

Jogging

The , , , , and buttons will each jog the machine along the Y, X or Z axes, respectively.

The distance moved by each button click is determined by the current value (in mms) shown in the drown-down control at the center of the jogging buttons. Ensure that you adjust this value appropriately before using the jog buttons to move the machine.

Setting and Resetting Origins

By default a machine with homing support will have its X Y origin (the postion of the coordinate X:0 and Y:0) set to the bottom left corner of machine's machinable area following a homing cycle - i.e. the machine will operate in a positive coordinate work space within its machinable area. For machines without homing support, the initial X Y origin must always be set manually before running a toolpath. In additon, when a toolpath is created it is very common that the X Y origin will actually be chosen to be relative to the material (not the machine bed) - for example, the center of a design may be used. For most toolpaths, therefore, you will need to jog the machine to the matching origin location for the toolpath (relative to your material), and manually before cutting.

For machines with homing support, you can restore the bottom left corner origin after setting it for a specific toolpath by clicking at any time. When this button is clicked the location of coordinate position X:0, Y:0 will once again be set to the bottom left corner of the machine's machinable area.

Running the Toolpath

The Cut tab contains the controls need to begin cutting your toolpath and monitoring its progress.

Cut Now

When your machine is correctly set-up (with the X,Y and Z origins set), click this button to begin streaming the toolpath to your machine and begin cutting.

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Estimated Time Remaining

Once your toolpath has started, VTransfer will provide a dynamic estimate of the remaining time until the toolpath is finished.

Dynamic Feedrate Override

If your machine supports feedrate override control and the option is enabled in your configuration, then the and buttons will be available. Click these buttons to increase or decrease the current toolpath feedrate by 10%. The current state of the feedrate override setting is indicated by the percentage value between the two control buttons.

Abort

This button will stop the toolpath as quickly as possible, usually resetting the controller in the process. Once a toolpath has been aborted you should re-home and re-origin before running a subsequent toolpath.

Settings