A CNC Mill Older Than Me!

The Roland PNC3000 was a desktop CNC mill released in 1986. Somehow, one ended up in the AIAA/WREC shared club room in the aerospace building. For 7+ years before me, nobody was using it and people assumed it was broken.

Turns out, it was not! 

However, I had to contact the manufacturer, find old manuals and software, and use a 20-year-old computer to communicate to it via a parallel port using a printer driver.

To get machine commands from SolidWorks (my preferred CAD & CAM at the time), I also had to write my own post-processor code that filters only the usable commands for this machine to get the programs to actually run. It was a major hassle and I now have access to better machines, so not a super practical project- however, an amazing learning opportunity.