 Great Lakes Industry, Inc., of Jackson,
Michigan, is a manufacturer of power transmission
components for the agriculture and construction industries.
GLI first put OpenCNC on a two–axis lathe
over seven years ago. Since that time, they've
installed OpenCNC on lathes, machining centers,
and gear hobs expanding capacity at a fraction
of the cost of new equipment. OpenCNC now
controls over two dozen machines at GLI.
Taking advantage of OpenCNC’s patented multiple job
streams technology, which allows the software to be
reconfigured to add additional machines or applications
as well the flexibility afforded by OpenCNC's open
software architecture, the crew at GLI then added
material handling automation to their OpenCNC
machine tools.
They integrated gantry robot loaders with some of the OpenCNC machines, a
process that is easily done in OpenCNC. Unlike closed or proprietary controls,
just one copy of OpenCNC can control the CNC machine tool, the gantry robot
and also coordinate the two. This is accomplished from the same PC, using a
single processor, running Windows NT.
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