Langmuir Systems

The brief

Langmuir Systems builds industrial machines for makers, fabrication shops, and small-batch manufacturers — CNC plasma cutting tables, a 25-ton CNC press brake, and an industrial powder-coat oven. Each machine needed control software that felt as engineered as the hardware: fast, reliable, cross-platform, and friendly enough that a hobbyist could pick it up without a CNC background.

Three product lines, one engineering effort.

FireControl — CNC plasma cutting

Operates the CrossFire / CrossFire PRO / XR family of plasma cutting tables on Windows and macOS. Real-time program execution with continuous and step-based jogging, live program visualization with zoom and pan, automatic torch-height compensation driven by voltage feedback, pierce-delay tuning during runs, dry-run mode for testing without plasma, on-the-fly feed-rate override, and manual nesting calculations for material optimization. Touch-screen friendly with full keyboard-shortcut parity.

Hooks cleanly into Fusion 360 and SheetCAM for CAM workflows, and integrates with the optional LS Torch Height Controller module.

BendControl — Titan 25T press brake

Drives the Titan 25T 25-ton CNC press brake. The hardest engineering problem here is synchronizing two hydraulic rams — oil compressibility, valve hysteresis, and structural flex all conspire to throw them out of step under load. Glass-scale linear encoders feed both ram positions back to the motion controller, and the software constantly trims valve drive to keep them within ±0.001″ at full load.

Conversational programming mode lets the operator enter bend parameters directly — no external CAM required. Real-time hydraulic-pressure monitoring on both cylinders, integrated touchscreen UI, and an optional 2-axis CNC backgauge for automatic material positioning.

CureControl — Vulcan 16 powder-coat oven

Powers the Vulcan 16 industrial powder-coat oven. Closed-loop PID temperature control across the full 16 ft³ chamber, custom cure profiles, and a built-in time-to-temperature calculator for batch production planning. Holds ±5 °F across the entire interior; reaches 400 °F from cold in roughly 15 minutes.

Engineering challenges

Real-time motion at the desktop OS layer. Plasma cutting demands sub-millisecond responses to torch-height adjustments. We pinned critical threads, built a dedicated USB protocol stack, and made host-side scheduling cheap so the OS scheduler stays out of the way.

Cross-platform consistency. Feature parity between Windows and macOS without forking the codebase. Native primitives where they matter (file dialogs, system tray, autostart); shared C++/Qt abstractions everywhere else.

Conversational over CAM. Press-brake operators don't want to round-trip through external CAM software for every bend. BendControl's conversational mode handles ~90% of jobs directly, with manual mode as escape hatch for the rest.

Outcome

All three machines ship with the corresponding control software included, no third-party licensing. Customer setup time is measured in single-digit minutes. The combined control suite is one of the differentiators Langmuir sells against commercial offerings that start at 4–10× the price.