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#304 Python script for tool setup is working!
221 Plays2 years ago
Topics:
- Saunders is getting a Willemin!
- Purchase process, options chosen, etc.
- Machine shop insurance
- Saunders python script for tool setup is working!
- ChatGPT and Dall-E
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Wilhelmin Machine Excitement
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the Business of Machining, episode number 304. Happy holidays, everybody. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough. How are you? I'm wonderful. I have some exciting news to share. Oh, yeah? Yes. Share it. It is not official, but as official as it needs to be to share the news, which is that we are getting a will then.
00:00:25
Speaker
Yes. The refurbished one or used one or whatever? Exactly. Probably. I think it's in the serial number 100 in
Challenges with Machine Acquisition and Old vs New Dilemmas
00:00:35
Speaker
teens. I forget which exactly. I think it's 118 or something. Mine's 128. Okay. Oh, so yours is way newer. Yeah. Considering.
00:00:43
Speaker
So yeah, I know it was a bit of a back and forth, both with holiday schedules and details and the machine and accessories, both from Wilhelmin and otherwise. But we, you know, it's funny, I, I won't say I got cold feet, but we just kind of sharing or maybe oversharing, we've had two problems here at the shop with other machines that are new. And it kind of made me think, man, I don't love dealing with
00:01:11
Speaker
I don't love dealing with expensive service and maintenance and repair and downtime. So what am I thinking about trying to go build processes around a almost 20-year-old machine? And it was a legitimate conversation around what the new options are that are similar to it, not like proper. What do you call that? It's a small mill turn.
00:01:38
Speaker
Yeah, but the difference is, well, but the difference is there are two big differences in my opinion. Number one is the B, the sub spindle has a chuck and not a turning spindle. Sure. That's the huge biggest difference. And the second is the Wilhelmin has a pretty good chip to chip time, whereas a lot of the mill turns are seven to 10 seconds, which just doesn't work for us. So you just call it a Wilhelmin. It's its own, like there's not a lot like it out there, if
Designing and Setting Up the Wilhelmin Machine
00:02:06
Speaker
anything.
00:02:06
Speaker
Maybe some Chiron's do similar work, but... Oh, no, there's Chiron's, there's Starag or BumaTech, and then there's... Actually, Mayzac has an A100 or A150 that's fairly similar. Anyway, those weren't really the competitors because most of those prices were not reasonable, but there are some mill turns that we seriously looked at.
00:02:29
Speaker
Anyway, I'm excited to have the will and what's super exciting is also like I already have these part families, we were ready to kind of move over to it. But then even at our manager meeting, we came up with this different part. And we're just like, Oh, yeah, we'll just run that on the wheel. Like we're, we're now because we have it in our toolbox, we're thinking about designing parts that allow which is backward. Like I wish we should cover these parts and I'll buy the machines to fit them to it. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, it was good.
00:02:59
Speaker
But yeah, it's fun. Certain parts can be made on any number of your machines, but it starts to become clear, like, oh yeah, that's a willing part. As far as setup and programming and easiness, it just should work on that machine. That said, I came in a little bit early today. I mean, I think we're both on holiday right now. Are you guys working this week? Yeah, we work. OK. Yeah, we're off this week.
00:03:23
Speaker
Anyway, so I came in early today and worked on the Willamond a little bit. I'm trying to make this little bushing, which basically just turned OD, drilled hole, chop it off kind of thing. Now, all of a sudden, every milling operation that I try to do is giving me a C-axis commanded in spindle mode error. It will not allow the turning spindle to home to rotate.
00:03:49
Speaker
when I try to call a milling tool. I can't figure out why it's driving me crazy. Yeah, so C is your turning spindle's orientation, if you will, right? Like a fourth axis. They usually call it the A on this machine. Even though it's turning spindle, it's C, A, whatever. Okay.
00:04:09
Speaker
So I don't think it's a post problem. Um, I think it's the machine is stuck in some mode that I can't, uh, it won't let it do milling at the current moment. And I'm just, I'm reading through the manual, trying to figure out things. Um, there's the thing you can do, like on the turning spindle, when you remove the nut that holds the collet in place, just like a big ER 80, not kind of thing. Okay. Um,
00:04:36
Speaker
Normally, the turning spindle is just floppy and it's really hard. There's no secondary wrench really to do it. You want to lock that spindle into milling mode basically so that you can put a wrench on the cover and remove it. It just makes it easier. To do that, you go M39, next line G0, G28, A0, which should turn it into milling mode and home it.
00:05:00
Speaker
And then you're locked. And even that gives me the same alarm. Oh, okay. In MDI. So, I don't know.
00:05:08
Speaker
I remember them saying, this was really the spindle brake. So when you are turning with a turning tool in the spindle, they were mentioning that that's an easy and good way to mess this machine up is to put too much rotational torque on a turning insert in the B-axis spindle and overcome the brake, messes things up big time.
00:05:32
Speaker
That's a different brake than you're talking about, but I would still think it would be bad to try to loosen or tighten against the spindle brake, no? Didn't you dual wrench it? The spot to put a second wrench, it's these two rotating collars, and I'm not exactly sure what they do, but I think they have an important function.
00:05:53
Speaker
And they slip or something. So I don't know. I asked somebody else with a Willamette and he's like, yeah, put it into milling mode and wrench it. And that nut does not have to be crazy tight. It's just like go till it stops and then snug it kind of thing.
00:06:08
Speaker
And so you can't do anything, you can't go back into turning, you can't turn apart either now? I can do turning operations, no problem. Oh, okay. It's just, and this used to work. Last time I tried to run a program, it worked fine. So I don't know what I'm doing here. So I sent a text to CJ and to Marcus and Wilhelmin as well.
00:06:26
Speaker
I'm stuck. That's the thing with this machine is there are times when I feel like a total noob because I don't know. The manual is wonderful, but it's a FANUC manual. It's 400 pages long. It's got some good search to it, but it's fun. Yeah, that's interesting. You power cycle the machine? Yeah, a couple times.
00:06:54
Speaker
weird. Not like I'm going to help you here. I wish I could. No. Yeah. I'm just giving you light. Yeah. It works. It works great.
00:07:05
Speaker
I have a weird thing that I have to balance with not going overboard with this, but when it's weird time.
Holiday Work Strategies and Tooling Choices
00:07:12
Speaker
So like it's a common vacation time or things are down or services backed up or it's the end of the year. We, I do deliberately kind of pull back what we do that's experimental or new or setups because it's like, Hey, let's not screw things up. Let's just keep not saying, no, sure. No, I forget it though.
00:07:29
Speaker
It doesn't work for you because you're trying to get the machine up and going. It's not like it was otherwise busy, but it is an unfortunate reality that it's harder to get attention when... Which is frustrating because it's your time to catch up on stuff. This is obviously why I've been asking about the Rego fix and the ERs. I am going to buy more ERs than I think that I thought because I think
00:07:57
Speaker
Maybe I'm wrong. I'm pretty sure I'll just use them period. We don't have the type of parts where I'm as concerned with the projection size, like the tip size of the holder, even though the rego is so much tighter than an ER.
00:08:15
Speaker
I figure I'll start with ERs and if we do go rego, we can keep the ERs for general purpose stuff and drills and taps and then so forth. Do you use traditional ER 16s or do you use those ER 16s that apparently have better TIR because they're only a single taper? There's like a flat, they're a flat top ER? I've never used those ones. They're kind of like the SK Collets that Mary told us. I've never used those ones. No, this is a Technics
00:08:41
Speaker
thing. Okay. I don't know. Is it? Yeah. I know like the company Technics, they have a lot of marketing jargon and I don't know if it's true or not, but they're like, they have a couple options like that. Like their power code nut has a coding on the thing that makes a better TIR and all this stuff. But yeah, in your situation, I would buy, let's say 10 ER 16s.
00:09:05
Speaker
as stubby as possible from Technics or whoever else, HSK40E, and then just start with that, and then just start making parts. Yeah. And then buy as necessary after that. That's exactly what I'm going to do. And some turning holders, obviously. Like this part that I don't need to run right away, I know we're going to have a weird 440 tap in it. That could be ER later, so that can be like a quarter inch rougher for now. Yep, yep, totally.
Machine Accessories and Insurance Considerations
00:09:32
Speaker
So what else?
00:09:35
Speaker
Not purchased from Willeman, what else do you need for it? Bar feeder. Okay, you're going to go L&S? Got it. I am Kibosh 338. Cool.
00:09:46
Speaker
Six footer. I almost want to do a video on it. It's totally garbage view count type of video. But again, I don't care. But it's all the lessons that I've already learned talking with folks about, hey, here's why not to get a bar feeder that's 12 feet about the bar requirements, assignment requirements, stock requirements, prep requirements, gripper jaws. And bar prep, whether bar prep means chamfer or whether it means
00:10:14
Speaker
actually turning down the end of bars and then things like, like the gotchas of like, okay, well, it's a, I'm going to use inch because that's my world, but it's a one inch machine. I think it's technically 25 to 26 millimeters, but you can't bar feed the capability of the machine because the bar feeder collet thickness would preclude or interfere. So if I want to turn the max diameter, what are the options of frontage? Like all these little things that we talked about going to the next size up. And then anyway,
00:10:43
Speaker
A lot a lot learn i'll put it that way and i gotta give a shout out to the guy tyler has been solid on answering a lot of newbie questions about bar feeder stuff buying a brand new off the shelf i am.
00:10:56
Speaker
So they found us a seven or eight month old, it's not a demo model. It's a model that went to a long-term Willam and customer who ordered a new one that wasn't ready. And so they sent them this one to use as a stopgap. So new to me and they're going to take it back, tweak up, fix what little things may need fix on it. Yup. Do you mind if I ask the price? Maybe not necessarily of the used one, but like what's the price range of a brand new
00:11:25
Speaker
Yeah. No, it's not cheap. The ballpark delivered with a couple of collets, all this stuff, almost 40. Whoa. Okay. I bought a, I think it was old stock LNS for like low 20 something thousand. Yeah. But I haven't plugged it in yet. So I don't really have much to say, but I do have LNS on the Swiss. So do you have familiar with them? Sure. Sure. And I'm similar. I'm just basically copying
00:11:54
Speaker
what CJ did, but it's also a very common Wilhelmin recipe. They work well together. And that was one of my questions was, look, I'm a numbers guy, I'm a risk guy, so can I use this barfier if God is hard to think about? If we got a new Wilhelmin, you know, would this work?
00:12:11
Speaker
ends up it actually probably won't. That's a whole other conversation. Sure. But I at least wanted to talk that through and then just things like, hey, what are the resale value of this thing? Because look, that's what I'm really conscious of is if after six months, we blow the A axis or we crash the machine, unfortunately. What do you do? Are you willing to write that check? Or do you scrap it? It's really not fun to think about, but you might as well think about it.
00:12:40
Speaker
But also if you, if it doesn't work out for you, if you don't like it, if you don't actually like the workflow, if you don't want the machine anymore, you know, if you're buying a bar loader for it, you want to be able to sell it as a package. Like now I'm selling a machine and a bar loader, like package. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:12:58
Speaker
On that note, I will throw some shade toward the insurance industry here. It's a little bit personal, but it's my word against theirs. But I was told, and I remember it clearly, a conversation sitting down that I have a machine shop insurance package with a rider. And the words matter, and I don't remember them off the top of my head, but it's a
00:13:22
Speaker
equipment breakdown, I believe rider, and it's not that expensive, which is frankly, kind of the you get what you pay for, like too good to be true flag. And I even asked him, I was like, wait a minute here. This would include a crash event. And I was told yes. Now what what a person tells you doesn't matter because it's only what's written down.
00:13:46
Speaker
And one of the things I've done a few times in my life is gained out, OK, well, should I make a claim? And so when we crashed the DT2, I didn't think I was going to follow through on the claim. But I thought, let me at least see what this process looks like, which is totally permissible. You can still, whether it's the adjuster or the conversation or the paperwork, because it's like, hey, if I really want to make a claim one day, we really have a big incident.
00:14:12
Speaker
Then it's not your starting from scratch. Sure enough, I got sold a bill of Bologna. It's really only equipment breakdown as frankly the policy is labeled to their credit of if a pump just goes bad or something.
00:14:34
Speaker
I guess to be clear. I didn't exhaust this. I didn't actually challenge them on this or ask them why. But reading through the policy now, because there were questions of like, well, what happened? Do you really want it? And I was like, OK, wow. And it's frustrating, I guess, more because I'm pretty cynical about some of these insurance type products. And so sure enough, I was sold something that was based on the marketing premises verbally of something that it's not. So anyway.
00:15:03
Speaker
I know I mentioned that before in the podcast and I have crash insurance and let me tell you what, I don't. And there's a fine difference between operator error and machine just wear and tear breakdown, whatever. And then there's, what are they ensuring? The cost of the replacement parts or the downtime revenue generated of that machine for the weeks that it's down or yada
00:15:24
Speaker
No, that's an excellent question, John. I don't know. And I might still be wrong because, look, it sounds weird sort of to think like, oh, wow, you have an insurance policy in case somebody crashes the machine. Well, what do you think auto insurance is? That's all auto insurance, basically. Exactly. When I goof driving, this policy that costs between $1,000 and $2,000 a year covers well into the five figures of damage of the vehicle as well as huge amounts of injury. So anyway.
00:15:53
Speaker
Yeah. A few months ago when we had power problems like at the road when the transformer skipped exploding and we were down for days and six businesses around here, we got together and we're like, do we file a claim with our own insurance or do we take the power company?
00:16:13
Speaker
to tell them to pay us our wages kind of thing. We looked all into that. Our team looked into our insurance policy because we do have business interruption insurance. This was a legitimate case for it, no problem. I had my guy look into it.
00:16:32
Speaker
Obviously there's a, I don't know the terms, but a premium or an inflation or like a cost goes up, but deductible, not just deductible, but your monthly goes up by so much, yada, yada. So like after, what is it? 10 days of being out of business, it's worth it. Any less than 10 days, it's not worth it for like the next two years of monthly payments kind of thing.
00:16:58
Speaker
So we were only down for like four days, five days or something. I'm just like, it's not worth it. Yeah, but shame on them because the idea that what you're saying is effectively, you're giving me a form of financing my downtime, but I have to pay it back to myself. Screw you. Yeah. That's not insurance. And look, I get it. Insurance companies have to be profitable overall. But this idea that in that case, what a perfect example, John. It was no fault of your own. Yeah.
00:17:24
Speaker
Like that's the epitome of, hey, I should be made whole because I pay you annual premium. So I don't mean to spend time on a soapbox, but rather to say, for those of you out there that have insurance, push back, ask questions. And I've talked to lots of folks, especially in the real estate industry, that were sick of it. Like this insurance now of requiring replacement value where you're taking a 30, 40 year old building that you would never insure for,
Tech Innovations and Mentorship Insights
00:17:52
Speaker
you know, four or five times what you paid for it and they're forcing you to is just not reasonable.
00:18:06
Speaker
Well, let's change the subject onto more exciting things. Alex's script, this is our video this week of scraping or parsing. I like the word scraping better, but parsing through setup sheets, creating tool lists across multiple fusion files via the setup sheets that we create out of those files already saved our butt.
00:18:26
Speaker
We had an intern load a part of the stock about one inch to the left. That's our fault because we need a better process around that. But when that part was loaded about one inch to the left, it caused the through spindle coil drill to drill right on the edge of the part, which broke the drill. And so, okay, this was
00:18:44
Speaker
The day before hours before we were going to leave for Christmas, we had an overnight run ready to go. I looked at that list. Sure enough, there was a program that I didn't even think of that uses that drill. We made sure to pull it out of the cycle so it would not use the drill that no longer exists. Awesome. Yes. Okay, cool. Can we watch that video? Yeah.
00:19:04
Speaker
And I already 3D printed a labeled jig to either use it to set up the stock or use it to confirm the stock for that part. That way, again, my view is not fair for us to criticize the intern because we need to make processes that have a PocoYoke element to them.
00:19:25
Speaker
Our view line process bins got delayed because of that storm, but they should be here today. I cannot tell you how excited I am to start. Um, actually those are going to be a good video. It's as simple as it could be, but like, oh man. Nice. Yeah. Yeah.
00:19:44
Speaker
What are you going to do? What's new? I've been off the past three days or so. It's just like totally checked out, total family time. I haven't even checked my email or done anything. It's so weird. Oh, really? Yeah. I feel so unproductive. It was quite nice to come into the shop this morning and just play on the willing for a little bit. But it's been good. It's been awesome. Just head home with the family, with the kids, spend time. Awesome. So I'm kind of checked out almost.
00:20:14
Speaker
Good. That's great. Um, we, uh, tip of the hat to Robin Renzetti. I, um, I call him maybe once a year. I try not to abuse that privilege and ask him a question when I'm stumped. And every time he's come through, um, and it does, it's kind of funny. He doesn't like give me the answer, not that he's withholding the answer, but he gives me enough guidance, um, which is kind of like, you know,
00:20:37
Speaker
It's kind of what a good mentor does. Cool in that sense. And so the problem that we had is so basic yet not necessarily intuitive.
00:20:48
Speaker
which is the fact that Uniforce Clamps from Mighty Bite do a great job at applying a angular force, so outward and downward. So they do, even the quarter 20 version, which is the one we most often use, has something like 1500 pounds of clamping pressure. And that's a lot per clamp. And in this particular instance, we have two clamps on the part. So you're applying quite a few thousand pounds to 3000 pounds of torqued clamping pressure.
00:21:20
Speaker
And a big vice might have six to 10,000 pounds, but it's also a hundred pound cast iron monolithic block. So we were deflecting this fixture. I've mentioned it before on the podcast, I think, but basically when you
00:21:38
Speaker
clamped the uniforms clamp, it was applying force left to right. And that was bowing the fixture up toward the operator. And I saw it, not because I was measuring it, I saw it because I saw the beat of coolant at the top of the fixture evaporate when you clamped it. And then when you unclamped it, the little beat of coolant came back and that showed that liquid betrayed the fixtures flexing. And so I actually couldn't think about how to fix it. The part didn't lend itself to
00:22:08
Speaker
different. This is such a good way to hold it that I wanted to solve it. My first inclination was to build a bigger fixture, like stronger fixture. Yeah. But it's kind of like, well, you're, that can work for sure. And there was room to improve there, but you're ultimately just, um, you know, you're fighting fire with fire there. Like let's be smarter. And, um, I'm proud that I came up with this. So Robin talked about some terms that I kind of had to write down and chew on it, like clamping through the neutral axis and, um, anticipated flex. And I made a bunch of notes.
00:22:38
Speaker
And when I realize the answer is unbelievably obvious, don't screw the uniforms into the fixture.
00:22:46
Speaker
Okay. So if you think about having a fixture, aluminum, steel, whatever, but let's say for the sake of the example, it's a picture that comes coming on and off the machine, you know, so if you're screwing into that fixture with a uniforms, you're going to bow it out, you're going to put stress on and bow the fixture, full stop, even if it's a stronger fixture, it's just going to bow by less maybe, but you're going to bow it.
00:23:08
Speaker
what I realized is clamp through the fixture. So now instead of the quarter 20 screw clamping into the fixture, there's a clearance hole and the screw screws into the, in this case, tombstone behind it. Okay. And so now it's sandwiching the fixture. So not only is it not putting the radial stress or the flex stress in the fixture, it's actually
00:23:30
Speaker
keeping it flat by acting itself as its own sandwich. Okay. Yeah, interesting. I mean, it's still putting the left to right force squishing out. That's what the clamp does, right? Well, the clamp does that, but the action of bowing
00:23:46
Speaker
When you try to screw, you're not trying to screw the fixture out by creating that stress, if you will. Yeah. So threading through the fixture to the base layer, the tombstone, it keeps it down. It actually pulls it downwards. Yep. That's pretty cool. Have you tried it yet, or is it still theory? Sorry. It's actually technically still theory, but I'm good. I've made the fixture. No, it's a huge win. Over the weekend, we made some other really good quality of life improvements to the fixture.
00:24:16
Speaker
Actually, the biggest thing I'm debating, I have very little experience with cast iron other than permanent fixtures. This will not be permanent. This will be a screw that's actuated quite a few times a day. So I'm assuming for no good reason that cast iron is just not a great fit for that. So we're going to
00:24:40
Speaker
My plan is I'm just going to install HeLaCoils to start. I'm worried that over time the HeLaCoil itself could kind of back out. We're using the Loctite style HeLaCoil, not the Tang style, because I do think we'll need to be able to replace these, but long-term, my plan if
00:24:59
Speaker
if the helic oil fails or wears out is we'll machine out a flange with a pocket and they will actually insert a sort of, I don't know how to describe it, but like a washer that has a section that holds like a flange washer so you can screw the washer down to the tombstone. Yeah. In the middle of that would be the thread
00:25:19
Speaker
And that would be really fun because it could be a Willman part where you could actually machine that, heat treat it, make it real nice, and then probably won't ever fail. But if it did, you just pop it out and screw a new one in. That's my plan. I like it. I like it. Yeah. But it felt really good to
00:25:39
Speaker
improve on that iteration and again shout out to Robin. Nice. He's a good dude. He's super good dude. He's probably the kind of guy that gives you the kind of basic obvious advice with 40 plus years of machine shop experience. It's like I never thought about it like that.
00:25:58
Speaker
The other thing, and again, he didn't explicitly tell me this, I kind of realized it as I'm interrogating my own fixture was we had a single block of aluminum that had four positions for eight parts along it. And this was the same fixture that's flexing. And what makes it even worse is even though we're using torque crunches, when you would remove
00:26:20
Speaker
say, part seven and eight, if you wanted to measure them before you cut the rest of the parts. The reality is, and so obvious, removing two of the parts changes the flex of the fixture. Now you can put them back in and try to rematch it with the torque wrench, but there's really no reason to have that fixture cross contaminate each other's position. So the new fixture, we're actually going to just make them independent. But even if you wanted to make it
00:26:47
Speaker
There's reasons it can be really nice to have a fixture be a single piece. I would still put machine in like isolation channels so that the clamping action of position one and two doesn't really do anything on three and four. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, more smaller fixtures is where I've been leaning as well. Oh, yeah, it's just better.
00:27:07
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you have a way to mount multiple on the machine at one time or a pallet changer type thing that, you know, brings them in one time, but it just simplifies programming and patterning and consistency across parts and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to keep talking, but I'm happy to mention another thing unless you go for it. No, go for it.
Impact of AI like ChatGPT on Various Fields
00:27:30
Speaker
Dude. Have you seen chat GPT? I've played with it a little bit. Yeah.
00:27:35
Speaker
Okay, so I'm of the opinion that this is going to change our lives and certainly our kids' lives in a meaningful way. Yeah, I think so too. Okay. Some people I've talked to are kind of like, yeah, what's the big deal? I can like... Yeah. And I'm like, oh, okay. Hey, maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty comfortable putting my stake in the ground and saying, no, this is...
00:27:55
Speaker
So folks don't know, Google it, YouTube it, and New York Times has posted like an article every day on it, but it is a chat.
00:28:06
Speaker
It's kind of weird to describe. You can ask it to do things for you. So you can ask it to write you essays, answers, speeches. You can ask it to write basic computer code. You can ask it to write post processors. Yeah, I've done FANUC G-code. It worked OK for FANUC G-code. I played with it. And Pierre here at the shop was the one that first showed it to me. And he said, write me a song about John Grimm's most speedio.
00:28:32
Speaker
That's all it did. And it was like, oh, speedio, oh, speedio. It was like 10 verses of song. It was good. Yeah. My buddy is an attorney, asked it to write a brief on Ohio criminal trespass, and it cited the Ohio Revised Code section. Now, look, there's major points where it's flat out wrong, and people have now been pointing these out. It asked twice. It asked to write a bio on a famous tech guy, and it gave his place of birth wrong both times.
00:29:00
Speaker
But nevertheless, homework is toast. I was wondering about that. Somebody mentioned it at Christmas party. And I want to hear this. If anybody out there is directly tied to education, I actually would love to hear what schools are doing. But this friend said his friend is a teacher or a professor at college, and their college has already effectively immediately stopped take-home essays.
00:29:24
Speaker
because there's no point. You can't run the essays through plagiarism software because this isn't how it works like that. And if you wanted to write an essay on Mark Twain's Adventures in whatever, it'll write your essay on it. Like it's insane. And it's not perfect, but you can tweak it and react to it. And then you can even take the same thing and say, okay, rewrite that, but with a few typos and it'll add some typos to it. I mean, it is crazy.
00:29:51
Speaker
So first off, I'm bringing it up because at the risk of abusing our audience's attention, it's one of those full stop game changers in the lives. Apparently chat GPT 4.0 is coming out as soon as three months.
00:30:07
Speaker
podcast that was where folks had either I don't know if they had access to it or I had like sort of direct knowledge of it. It is apparently a significant improvement on 3.5. What's not hard to think of like you can see how it has weaknesses, but oh my gosh, I think that there's already a major improvement coming. And for the video,
00:30:31
Speaker
In this week's video, we did not use the software to write the code that we needed for sure, and I don't think it would be able to. But if you want to ask it to write Python script, JavaScript, I don't know why I'm trying other languages. Apparently, it's quite good at the big Java, Python, the HTML, the big languages like that.
00:30:51
Speaker
It's crazy, John. Oh my gosh. Even if just to give you the head start, the gist of it, like that piece of code you're missing, you can't figure out kind of thing. Not necessarily to write the whole program from scratch, but like to chunk it, to piece it. And I tried it with FANUC G-code. I was like, draw a circle at X zero or something in FANUC G-code. And it did it with like 10 lines of code. And I'm like, well, that's kind of cool. And it comments it all. Yeah.
00:31:21
Speaker
So like, you know, if you would say like write a robo drill G code pattern to drill a four holes on a four inch square pattern, it will do that. And then it will like even comment, like make sure your tool numbers tool nine or whatever. Yeah. Have you played with the image editors?
00:31:39
Speaker
I don't know. I didn't know you could get to them for free. Yeah. There's, um, one called Dali D A L L dash E. Um, and you get, you get call it 50 free images to play with or 20 or something. And then you start paying, but it's, it's like 10 cents per per image per play. So I just bought $15 worth, which gets me another 150 images or whatever. And, um, that is fun too. And there's some other ones out there that are specifically made for logos, like company logos or brands.
00:32:09
Speaker
or product logos or whatever. So if you gave it enough keywords, you're like, make me a logo for Modvice. Either here's a reference image or just based on keywords, whatever. And it'll give you as many choices as you're willing to click on. And it's like my daughter is quite a good artist. And her and I talked about this a lot. And she's like, she's on the fence. She's like, it's going to screw with artists. And we're both kind of of the opinion that
00:32:38
Speaker
Like as a business owner, it is my way to mass throw ideas at the wall and see what I like. Because when you're hiring an artist to give you ideas, there's so much back and forth and there's so much, I don't like that, I don't like that, I don't like that. If I can have a computer do that, even better. And if I get something at the end that I then give to an artist and say, make this really good,
00:33:00
Speaker
but it's faster and easier for me. Dude, and I enjoy the philosophical debates about ethics and applicability, but the reality is the cat is way out of the bag. Yeah, totally. Those conversations are just going to get lost in the dust because, and apparently this is already being used for similar stuff. Like a lot of the chat, not the chat bots, but the actual things where it sounds like you're talking to a real person are for customer service. Like apparently this stuff already exists. Yeah, I don't know.
00:33:29
Speaker
That doesn't really bother. I don't think that sets off the nerve like this idea of having a, you know, I did, I asked it to write a year in speech for a, I didn't do it. Well, I don't know why I feel guilty. What's wrong about it? Write a year in speech at a for Christmas party to for our small manufacturing company. Yeah. And let me tell you, that's exactly what I would do. And then I would
00:33:54
Speaker
for sure edit the heck out of it. Make it your own. But oh my gosh. Yeah, that's a great idea.
00:34:00
Speaker
Now, funny example, you can have it interact with you as if it's like a DOS prompt or some other computer code type thing. And it responds back correctly. And this is kind of one of those insights into it. It's like huge failing points that for sure could be overcome. But nevertheless, I think it's kind of funny. If you ask it a DOS prompt, it will reply correctly, but not because it's actually computing the code and giving you the
00:34:24
Speaker
the defined output of that code, it just knows that's what the answer should say. So it's like if you wrote a script for Hello Print in Python, it would say Hello Print, not because it was actually processing that code, but it's just like, anytime that happens, I know I should say Hello Print. If I type, I don't know how many of our listeners remember DOS prompts, but CD backslides to list the directories or something or go back and directory. It'll give you the right answer for the wrong reason. Interesting.
00:34:55
Speaker
Yeah, you do that quite a bit in Linux, like playing on the Raspberry Pis. Yeah, exactly. You have to know those things or at least enough to like poke around, but interesting. But even that's a good point on Raspberry Pi, which is Linux based, I don't know what language you call it, but yeah, I know it's so little that I have to Google like how to do basic things in the terminal, you know, in the
00:35:23
Speaker
command. What do you call it? Oh, shit. Excuse me. Anyway. In the command line. So I don't know.
00:35:33
Speaker
So Google, there's Times article that Google launched some code red. I guess they have like an actual code red alarm because they recognize that chat GPT could quite quickly fundamentally overhaul the way the humanity interacts with the internet because Google's really good at pointing you to really good resources answers. Chat GPT has the potential to just give you the answer. Like I don't need stack overflow when you just write the code for me.
00:35:59
Speaker
Yeah, and I've been playing with it for that. And exactly as you said, if I'm looking for an answer and I ask Google, it points me to websites that might have an answer based on that. Whereas if you ask chat GPT, it just gives you the answer. And if you don't like it, you just ask again and it gives you a different answer in words, in a conversation. I think it's this and because of this and here's the site of sources or it doesn't cite the sources necessarily. But I'm sure you could ask it like, where did you get that information? I haven't done that yet. But that's a good question. That'd be kind of cool.
00:36:29
Speaker
Right. Is there a mechanism right now if you pay or know what you're doing or does this not exist to where you could upload some code and say, okay, instead of modifying a PDF, change this code so it does it to an HTML file?
00:36:50
Speaker
Can you feed it your own, not just the data set, but like your own code? Like take a rewrite this story. Probably. In the past tense or rewrite the story that would tell us about a trip to Las Vegas, but about a ski trip in Europe. You know what I mean? Probably, yeah. But how? It's not so much that you're, you just ask it in the question, I would assume. How do you upload the existing code, the existing story? Paste. I don't know. Yeah. If it's short enough.
00:37:20
Speaker
Yeah, Phil was, I'd seen it, but Phil was actually the first one that was like, got my attention of, we'll bring out to Charlotte for this, so tip of the hat to him. And was it Phil or CG that's already paying to upload their own dataset posts to have it rewrite posts? Which is just bananas.
00:37:39
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't know how that works. But I know in the chat GPT is the main big one everybody's talking about. That's one I've played with for chat. And then for images, there's dozens out there of different ones. So I don't know if this is becoming open source, that's like lots of companies are running with it, or if everybody all of a sudden is jumping on each other's back and trying to copy each other.
00:38:02
Speaker
Well, Dali too is the same company as chat GBT. It's open AI. And they're not going to open source the code, but they are being much more conscious of long-term impacts on humanity. And they have a for-profit sub, but it has a capped limit on the profitability because they're not intending to be the same
00:38:22
Speaker
motives as most venture funded tech startups, but apparently others like Google and maybe Meta have similar software, but they are too hesitant to release it because apparently the results can sometimes give you answers that many folks don't appreciate or think are pleasure incorrect or sorts, which look, I get it, but the reality is this is 800 pound gorilla storming through the room.
00:38:48
Speaker
Yeah, and one of the disclaimers I think on chat GPT was like, they basically said, look, listen, this is derived from the internet. It could be pop culture influenced. It could be, you know, the results are not necessarily PC. Yeah, I don't know.
00:39:07
Speaker
But I guess to wrap up this conversation, maybe keep it a little bit more relevant to a manufacturing entrepreneurship podcast. The reality is even today, let alone in six months, it is relevant for writing website copy. It will probably be helpful for Google ad strategies, if that's your thing.
00:39:25
Speaker
platforms customer service we played with it for answering difficult customers like how do you phrase this in a way that's like that's nice and friendly and still to the point and still direct and still like gets your way kind of thing and it just gives you options like was it Ryan and I used it for a line on our website I don't remember what it was specifically but it's like give me three options for like how to phrase this line and it added the one word I could not think of and once that word was there I was like perfect that makes sense now I like it
00:39:54
Speaker
I showed it to a buddy who's not tech related and I wanted to see how he would handle it. And he was like, tell me three good plays for a young high school football team. And it allowed line three, like a running back, a play option, fake and something else in like perfect detail. Like it's a ability to understand what you're going for. It's just mind blowing. That's amazing.
00:40:16
Speaker
Um, yeah. Cool. But play with, uh, play with Dolly. Okay. If you get a chance, it's, it's really fun. And it's, it's, it's garbage sometimes. And sometimes it's just like, holy cow. It works better. Like I did, uh, something about a lathe, like make a t-shirt that says, I love lathes or something. And it tried to draw like actual images of a lathe and from 20 feet away, it looks like a lathe, but up close, it's just stitched together kind of crappy images. But, um, anything animation.
00:40:46
Speaker
If you type artwork styles, if you type as a Van Gogh painting, if you type like those are the key words, you want the thing, you want the style, you want the setting and feature whatever and oh my gosh, it's so cool. Crazy. Okay, I will. It'll be fun.
00:41:04
Speaker
On a much more mundane note, we had a couple of fluorescent bulbs in the train building already die.
Shop Upgrades and Holiday Productivity
00:41:12
Speaker
And I'm like, look, I do not want to be dealing with stocking 300 T5s and T8 bulbs in a lift and getting up in there.
00:41:20
Speaker
And so those fluorescent fixtures or excuse me, LED fixtures are so less expensive than they used to be. Even when we built out this shop, they were $400 or $500 per fixture. Now they're like 120 bucks. And so I just bought all new fixtures for the building. And two of our interns are back on college summer or winter break and they put them up this week. I only literally did it because I'm like, I don't want to deal with light bulbs. Oh my gosh, shot.
00:41:48
Speaker
is now you look like you're looking at a Formula One garage. It is freaking awesome. It makes you smile. I love it. We still have those fluorescent tubes in our offices. I don't even think about it. They just work. They burn out every now and then. We have to throw one in. In both the shops, we have all the LED, everything. It's great. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you too.
00:42:18
Speaker
We good for next week, anything else? Yep, next week's perfect. Yeah, what are you up to the rest of this week? I am taking a couple days off. We're going to go poke around the mouths with the kids right down to West Virginia. But I'm just, we're killing it today, like running parts, processes, new fixtures. I'm actually running the lathe because Grant's out today, but it's been cranking. Yeah, it just feels good. Really does. Cool.
00:42:47
Speaker
You staying around the shop or you calling it a day?
00:42:50
Speaker
No, I got to head home shortly and then come back on Thursday because I'm expecting a delivery, all that foam from Norseman Foam. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. Coming on Thursday. I'm going to be here all day on Thursday by myself. Take that delivery. I want to play on the Wilhelmin a bit more. It's like this part that I'm making is just little bushing that I need for a little project, but the real reason is get the Wilhelmin working and check out all these bugs and just play with it and make it cool.
00:43:17
Speaker
Get the machine fully functional and then got to finish up the router and there's only a couple things I have to do left on it and then I should be able to cut stuff very shortly. That'll be awesome. Why is that not running yet, I guess?
00:43:35
Speaker
time effort to have it yet. But we've been tweaking away at it for sure. All I really have to do is tune the clear path motors now that it's installed on the base in the enclosure. So tune all the clear path motors, lower the tool rack a little bit, teach it the tool rack positions. And still got to plug everything back in, but that's easy. And then like just
00:43:57
Speaker
I don't know. Cut something? Yeah, okay. Good.
Router Project Update
00:44:01
Speaker
Not far away then? Yeah, not far away at all. Actually, I got a vacuum pump for it, a big bush vacuum pump that was single phase because the machine is single phase, 230 single phase. Except being a single phase motor, it draws so much current on startup that our 10 kVA transformer
00:44:21
Speaker
cannot supply enough juice to fully start up this vacuum pump. Holy cow. The solution will be to replace the vacuum pump with a three-phase vacuum pump. Then that's easier than switching out the transformer and all the wiring and things like that. Got it. Working with Bush on that one. Got it. That's crazy. It was pulling like 70 amps.
00:44:45
Speaker
Holy cow, John. Yeah, just on startup, and then it should level out to whatever. But when it was pulling so much amps, the voltage would drop from 230 down to 160 and just kind of stay there, meaning it can't provide enough.
00:45:00
Speaker
Yeah, hashtag not a electrical engineer or electrician, but isn't that why they have big starting caps on big single phase motors that start under load? We put a soft start control box on this. My electrician was in and did it all himself kind of thing. He really knows what he's talking about.
00:45:20
Speaker
Just kept blowing fuses. It would blow soft delay fuses. And he put amp meters on everything, and he's like blown away. He's like, this thing is drawing so much juice that it can't get past the startup, the run phase. And so with a smaller motor, or a three-phase motor, it will make it a lot better. Yeah. Awesome. Well, good luck. Good. Let's get that going. Yeah, it'll be fun. Awesome. All right. I'll see you next week. All right, man. Happy holidays. Bye. Bye.