IMTS Sneak Peek: Machine Tool App Knows Your Name

Walk into any booth at IMTS and a familiar drill springs into action. Someone waving a barcode scanner swipes your badge until that certain beep sounds, and now you’re ready to investigate the booth offerings. Much the same will happen in the Okuma booth, with one important difference: our scanning technology will reside right on the CNC machine you’re looking at, and it’s operated using a custom machine tool app we built for our CNC control. The purpose here is to demonstrate that our OSP controller is fundamentally a PC, a Windows^® computer you can use to customize applications for your own particular uses.

How the App Works

This year the badge scanning technology is rented to exhibitors by a company called Convention Data Services (CDS). We contacted CDS and made arrangements to purchase their API (Application Programming Interface), which allows our app to share information with their data. We’ll use a 2D barcode scanner to scan the QR code on our booth visitors’ show badges. In the background our application makes a call out to a service we have running in the cloud that will pull that person’s registration information and deliver it to our control on the machine tool. Once this is complete the display will show a customized greeting welcoming you by name to our booth and letting you know which Okuma distributor supports your shop location (see the example pictured above).

MORE: Visit the FAQs page in the Okuma App Store to learn more about the API

Interest in the Barcode Scanner

We actually used this app at IMTS 2014 as well. One of the things that really drew some attention is the fact that it works with a barcode scanner. Many folks are interested in what else can be done with a barcode scanner because they have interest in having codes relate to a part program that is selected on the machine. Or perhaps they have a part associated with a serial number that they want to later engrave on the surface. So our badge scanning demo also illustrates that, with a scanner and a little bit of programming, you can do things to streamline your processes.

RELATED: Learn about the CEI Okuma Barcode app, developed by Caron Engineering

Your Okuma API, Free for the Asking

Keep in mind, obtaining the API for your Okuma machine tool is free, all you need to do is ask. If your distributor gets involved with setup and installation there will be a charge for that service, but that’s it. With our simple demonstration at IMTS 2016 we’re showing you just the tip of the iceberg: with your API in hand you can do anything you can imagine by creating apps for your OSP control.

Casey Croussore is Software Engineer, Okuma America Corporation.

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