We met a lot of people as they stopped by the Tormach Booth to chat with us at EAA AirVenture last week - not only Pilots and Aviation Enthusiasts, but  Machinists, Fabricators, Educators, and many more people simply interested in technology.  One such group are the folks behind ThinkGlobalFlight.org, a non-profit organization that was created to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) in classrooms around the world.

We get a lot of questions into our technical department about how to get started with surface digitizing.    Digitizing, if you aren't familiar, is a technique that uses a touch probe to record a point cloud - basically a collection of XYZ coordinates that define a surface.

Derek Lahr is a grad student and senior member of the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa), a facility for graduate and undergraduate robotics research and education at Virginia Tech. Lahr also owns a Tormach PCNC 1100 mill, using it inside and outside the classroom.

Manufacturing Education is one of our passions here. Smart, well-rounded manufacturing professionals are needed around the world to solve the problems of tomorrow. Exposing students to hands-on manufacturing with real tools is essential, but too often neglected in the structure of formal engineering education. Improving this is what's at the core of our PCNC 770/Robotic work cell project.