We’ve all been there: faced with a tedious job that could be knocked out manually with a modest investment of time, we choose instead to overcomplicate the task and build something to do it for us. Such was the impetus behind this automated wire cutter, but in this case the ends justify the means.
That [Edward Carlson] managed to stretch a twenty-minute session with wire cutters and a tape measure into four days of building and tweaking this machine is pretty impressive. The build process was jump-started by modifying an off-the-shelf wire measuring machine, of the kind one finds in the electrical aisle of The Big Orange Store. Stripped of the original mechanical totalizer and with a stepper added to drive the friction wheels, the machine can now measure cable by counting steps. A high-torque servo drives a stout pair of cable shears through a nifty linkage, or the machine can just measure the length of cable without cutting. [Edward]’s solution in search of a problem ends up bringing extra value, so maybe the time spent was worth it after all.
If the overall design looks familiar, you may be thinking of a similar of another cable-cutting bot we featured a while back. That one used a filament extruder and was for lighter gauge wires than this machine.
[via r/Arduino]
https://xkcd.com/1205/
Across five years, how long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you’re spending more time than you save?
I know the answer to that question in so many different problem domains. :)
What Randall/XKCD is missing in this first-order analysis is the spillovers. You might spend more time than it’s worth automating one process, but if it teaches you something that helps you automate similar problems in a fraction of the time, it can still be a big winner.
Elliot’s rule of thumb: always automate tasks that are similar to other tasks that you’re likely to want automated. (And the ones that seem like fun.)
I agree, to an extent. I don’t think XKCD was suggesting this was a comprehensive solution to be universally applied either though. If you need to cut thousands of these or do so as part of a commercial production operation where the output quality matters or has a deadline, then automation may very well not just be in order but a very good idea! The value of learning and then reapplying learned information later is relevant, at least to a degree.
The frustration I have with this tends to stem from the fact that not every problem is easy or even practical to actually automate and there are many that are effectively impossible at present. Unspooling and cutting a defined and repetitive wire is actually very simple when compared to things like folding laundry, cooking food, surgery, automobile or electrical repair, autonomously driving a car in poor weather conditions, media production, legal prostitution, even writing code, etc. Anything where the inputs can be varied and widespread, it requires analysis of a large amount of potential problems (sometimes several at once) and requires three dimensional, physical work (typically with various tools) to execute correctly. It’s unclear how quickly or easily solved those “problems” are and how much (or how little) overlap there is between solving them as well. Solving how to fold laundry is not very likely to help one solve how to perform PCB repair (though it might at least help some).
That said, there are also plenty of things that automation is effectively starting to encroach upon. Accounting, mundane legal work, highway based truck driving, music generation, routine customer support, fast food order entry, etc. Even things like article writing for that matter are starting to be automated and can at times reach a degree where the reader cannot tell the difference.
“That said, there are also plenty of things that automation is effectively starting to encroach upon. Accounting, mundane legal work, highway based truck driving, music generation, routine customer support, fast food order entry, etc. ”
CEO. :-D
In my experience, cutting a cable to length takes normally less then 4 seconds to get it into the +/- 5 mm mark for shorter cables under a meter in length. And longer cables aren’t that much more time consuming.
The hassle I rather find myself in is stripping of the ends of the wire, especially on multi cored wire with braiding and stuff…
Not to mention installing it into a connector, that is at times a real hassle too.
Relatively speaking in comparison to just cutting the cable to proper length.