Anyone ever involved in the use or maintenance a plasma trace cutting Machine?
I am trying to remember just how exactly the reading head worked.?
The machine had a table along side and attached to the plasma cutting torch table.
The side table had a reading head that would read a specific B&W shop drawing print placed below it and follow the line, taking the plasma torch with it. Hence producing an actual metal part at the same time.
IOW the plasma would produce a part as outlined on the shop print DWG.
IIRC the head had a light it shone down on to the print in order to pick up the line , and an oscillating mirror in the head would pick up the outline of the print and steer the positioning servo's to track the print image exactly.
Similar to the many examples of line following vehicles out there, but very accurate and also capable of reading the fine detail of a shop print.
I assume now it has been replaced with DNC S/W.

 

plasma xerox?

never seen one. my guess is that it was simply using same line scan sensor as found in document scanners. mirror is angled and with sensor and light source forms a head (or they could be stationary, simplifies wiring). the head is rotated by small motor so sensor could pick lines in any direction. an encoder would provide rotation angle value to correlate line scans with head angle.