Development of styrofoam cutter NC machine for intricate cutting path

This paper deals with the design, manufacture and application of NC machine for cutting 2D intricate path of plane styrofoam. The cutter uses nickel wire heated by DC electric current. The X and Y axis is moved using open loop controlled stepper motor. The path that is cut is first was taken from picture, than changed the captured picture into line graph, and then programming the machine to follow the resulted line. The result shows that the machine can cut well in intricate path shape in the form of wayang figure without typing manually long NC code. The testing shows that the average distance error reaches of 0,245 mm on average in both x and y axis.