We have started shipping!

Can you believe it?!? This is a pretty big milestone for us, as it means we’ve ironed out enough kinks to finally get a machine out the door.

Here’s some things you should know.

– We’ve gotten in touch with the first handful of local pickups to arrange for pickups for their machines.

– We’re starting with some of the pickups because 1) if there’s an issue with the first set of machines, they will catch them the fastest 2) we can help these users in the local area the fastest if there are any issues.

– You will get a message with your tracking info and other important info before your machine ships. We will get in touch with you if there is any other info we need on our side.

Boards and testing

As mentioned in the last update, the boards have arrived and are going through testing.

From our testing last week, we ran into a snag. We found that we are triggering an alarm that freezes the machine under these circumstances:

The machine is experiencing a large cutting load (10mm dado bit at 6-8mm depth of cut)
The machine is cutting left to right

We suspect that the electromagnetic interference going to the Arduino on A0 pin is causing the machine to stop and send an alarm. As a quick note, we are using A0 pin for the “Stop” button which stops the machine and cancels the cutting job.

To mitigate this, we’ve added a capacitor across the ground and A0, A1, and A2 pins to mitigate the noise which are causing these issues. Solving this issue has resulted in spending some extra time testing and troubleshooting.

We have run the boards continuously multiple times for 20+ hour stints, to make sure that the EMI issue is fixed.

Just as a note, most of the boards will have the capacitors hidden on the underside of the board, so you won’t see them.

Resources page

You can find the latest resources and assembly instructions here: https://sienci.com/longmill-benchtop-cnc/

There are some other editing and details we are adding as we go along, but those will keep coming as we get feedback and more time to work on it.