TOPS is some­thing we’ve been work­ing on for the last few months.  Its really 3 tools made pos­si­ble by the com­bi­na­tion of
A) An inte­grated USB Micro­scope with TTS mount,
B) Plug-in pro­grams that work with Mach3, and
C) TOPS CAD, a 2D draft­ing and vec­tor­iza­tion program.

More Details:

1. TOPS Scope Opti­cal Cen­ter­ing Device.  This is sim­i­lar to other Mach3 USB cen­ter­ing devices, but instead of using a con­verted web cam it uses a dual mode USB video micro­scope.  The micro­scope has dual focus, for both 27X and 200X mag­ni­fi­ca­tion.  After cal­i­bra­tion pre­cise locat­ing and cen­ter­ing is as sim­ple as lin­ing up the on screen cur­sor over the fea­ture of inter­est — the cor­ner of a vise, the cen­ter of a hole, a speck of dirt — what­ever you can see on the screen.

2. TOPS Scan Dimen­sional accu­rate 2D Scan­ner  - Using a Mach3 plu­gin, TOPS takes a series of pic­tures and auto­mat­i­cally assem­bles them into a mosiac — sim­i­lar to the famil­iar satelite imag­ing mosi­acs found on Google Maps and other map­ping pro­grams. Scale is accu­rately deter­mined by spec­i­fy­ing a known dis­tance (i.e., plac­ing a scale in the field of view), or — even more accu­rately —  by the pre­cise motion of the machine itself.  Con­ven­tional CMM tech­nol­ogy requires very expen­sive tele­cen­tric lenses and high res­o­lu­tion cam­eras to achieve accu­racy with large image files.  TOPS Scan achieves accu­racy with a low cost cam­era by using the accu­racy of your machine and assem­bling the image out of smaller images.  We’ve cre­ated 100 meg image files and larger with­out issue.  Pretty amazing.

3. TOPS CAD 2D Reverse Engi­neer­ing Tool — TOPS CAD allows you to import scans to trace geome­tries and mea­sure fea­tures. It even includes a raster-to-vector image con­ver­tor to auto­mat­i­cally build model geom­e­try from a scanned image. Draw­ings cre­ated in TOPS CAD can be exported into .dxf files for use in CAM.

Here’s a pic­ture of the TOPS Scope and a screen shot of the Opti­cal Cen­ter­ing Module

The TOPS Scope is a USB micro­scope with TTS mount

Here’s a short video of TOPS Scan and some of the images we’ve taken so far…

And heres another video demo of  the TOPS CAD software.

The com­bined Scope, Scan, and CAD sys­tem makes it a breeze to recre­ate parts from old motor­cy­cles, clock­works, engines, or any­thing else that you might need to make.  Our exper­i­ments show that it’s effec­tive to a pre­ci­sion of about 0.002″ or bet­ter.  We’re look­ing to recruit a cou­ple Tor­mach own­ers who would like to put TOPs through its paces before it goes pub­lic.  Ide­ally, we’d like to find peo­ple with a project ready to go and able to pro­vide feed­back before the end of Octo­ber.  You won’t get free equip­ment, but we will pro­vide  every­thing at  a sig­nif­i­cantly reduced cost — we don’t expect any major changes to hard­ware after the beta.

If you’re inter­ested con­tact Andy at info@tormach.com to talk more about it.