UNIMAT CNC

Technical Education, TVET, Engineering, ...

Especially for innovative education in higher classes Unimat CNC is an interesting option. Due to the modular construction an almost infinte number of application possibilities arise. The Unimat CNC slides of the mill and the lathe are equiped with  2A steppers.

Some of the characteristics are:

  • Cross Slide: travel 50mm (extendable)
  • Longitudinal Slide: travel 145mm (extendable)
  • Accuracy: max. 0.07mm
  • up to 4 CNC axes controllable simultaneously

Particularly noteworthy are the low costs of this system. Instead of purchasing industrial machines  (high entry costs and ongoing expenditures, etc.), to which access is often not availabe to students, with Unimat CNC an entire machine park can be made available at only a fraction. Students can use this machines actively and autonomously.

The machines are controlled via the free software machinekit (fork of LinuxCNC, pre-installed on motion controller TCTCONT4) . This software can also be intalled for free on a common BeagleBone Black for training and simulation purposes.

What has been designed in a CAD application can be converted into machine code in a CAM application.
Machinekit offers a graphical interface as well as insight into and editing options for the G-code. For Fusion360 simple post processors with short manuals are available.

The cool tool CNC Education Set

UNIMAT CNC Complete Set (UNI-CNC-SET)

Includes all parts for the UNIMAT-CNC machine variants setting up UNI-DREH, UNI-FRAES-V3 or UNI-FRAES-4, plus cross plate for bigger parts

All Unimat CNC machine variants can be seen here.

Control Unit TCTControl (TCTCONT4)

Required for controlling the UNIMAT CNC machines

The pre-installed software allows for loading, manipulating and processing of ISO standard g-code files (RS-274). It also offers an editable tool table and tool path simulation. In addition to the manual also a training book for introduction to CNC and g-code programming is included.

Curriculum example

Curriculum secondary level II specialized grammar school, engineering, Schleswig Hollstein, Germany. pp. 33:

"Knowledge about automated production facilities …planning and processing of selected components ... the emphases must be on automation of production processes as well as on the CAD-CAM combination and quality management. … Processing of parts should be executed automated and students should be integrated in the process chain.”