Author: siencilabs

Carving cedar on the Mill One

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Here’s a quick project done on the Mill One, made from some blocks of cedar that Chris had found at Home Depot.

We had gotten a new 1/4″ 2 flute upcut bit as a gift that I hadn’t tried out yet, and I felt like a box would be a good project to try it out on. With the geometry of this box, most of the work is done carving out the inside of the box, and so a large bit which could remove a lot of material per pass was perfect.

I started off my surface milling a few mm into the wood, getting the thickness of the piece to about 1.375in. I did this because the top of the wood was slightly curved, and I wanted the top of the box to be flat.

In the beginning I had put the feedrate at around 700-800mm/min, but it felt to slow at that rate, so I bumped it up to about 1000mm/min. I think if I had kept the same feedrate, it would have given it a slightly nicer finish, but after some light sanding, the results would be indistinguishable.

One of the quirks about milling solid wood is that it will leave burrs, especially with softer wood like fir or pine. Cedar is a fairly light wood, and so there was a small amount of fuzzing at the edges, but it was easily picked or sanded off. Having a sharp bit certainly helped, and I did vary the router speed between 12,oooRPM to 16,000RPM to experiment, and found somewhere in between worked the best.

The box was drawn in Onshape and the gcode was create with Kiri:Moto, which you can add as an application in Onshape. Check out the design here: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/b27ffd01f4c9a086501d6171/w/13922f3e1399a3ddda8572bf/e/4a509eaa67fd88133009dc32

I have designed a lid for the box as well, and will be milling one out some other time.

You should be able to download the design and modify it to fit the dimensions you like. This box is designed to be made using router bits 1/4″ and smaller. If you want to use a larger router bit, increase the inner radius of the box to accommodate.

Have project ideas you want us to try out? Feel free to reach out to us!

 

How can the Mill One be used in your makerspace?

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3D printers, CNC machines, laser cutters, saws, tools galore. Makerspaces are the best place to go when you need access to tools and machines to create your next product. One of the challenges the people who operate makerspaces is that machines offered to their members need to be robust, reliable, easy to use, and affordable.

While easy to use and reliable 3D printers can be found in abundance, and there are a wide selection of laser cutters, there are no clear choice for a CNC router. With CNC routers coming in all shapes and sizes, some costing a few hundred, all the way to hundreds of thousands of dollars, it can be daunting when choosing the right tool.

So where does the Sienci Mill One come into play? Learning to use a CNC machine is a daunting, and with industrial size machines, can be dangerous as well. Users need to understand concepts like feedrate, depth of cut, and different types of passes to have success with a CNC milling machine. The Sienci Mill One offers a easy to learn platform to get users familiar with basic CNC milling concepts that can be used in all types of CNC milling machines. And at the price point it offers, makerspaces can purchase several units for the price of one expensive unit, giving more members access desktop CNC milling technologies.

The Sienci Mill One currently resides in several makerspaces in North America, and we’re looking forward to be putting our machines in more areas where people can mill amazing things!

 

Adding homing switches to the Sienci Mill One, by Troy

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With Troy’s instructable, you can now add homing switches to your Sienci Mill One!

What are homing switches? Homing switches allow a machine to touch off of each end of the axis to help find the absolute position within the unit. When the Mill One is first turned on, the current location in which it is at is considered the origin (0,0,0). Until the origin is reset, the machine will consider the movement of the axis to be relative to that origin point. By homing the machine, we can reset the machine to call the same physical position of the endmill to be the origin.

While in most cases, homing switches are not necessary, but in some cases, they can be useful. In a case where you want to make the same part over and over again, it is possible to make a jig to clamp the material in the same position on the bed. By homing the machine, you can set up the Mill One to start milling in the same location of the material every time. This is just one example.

To find out how you can add this feature to your Mill One, visit: https://www.instructables.com/id/Add-Homing-Switches-to-a-Sienci-Mill-One-CNC/

Back from MRRF 2017

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The Midwest Rep Rap Festival was amazing! Last weekend, over 1200 makers gathered together to share their projects and ideas. Our trip started off with a 600km journey to the middle of nowhere.

It was about a three hour trip through southern Canada, then through Michigan, Ohio, and finally to Indiana. We stopped a few times for gas and the washroom, but what really kept us going was the shepherds pie I had made at 2am last night.

And finally, we made it! We made it to Goshen, IN, home of MRRF.


Over the next few days, we’d be talking to hundreds of really interesting people, checking out really cool projects, and having a great time.

Well until next year, MRRF!

PS. A special thanks to everyone who came out and especially Kelly, who was our photographer for the trip.

220V Router Delays

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If you’re one of the 13 backers who are waiting on kits with 220V routers, we are still waiting on our UK supplier to receive new stock from Makita. In the meantime, they have offered to send us 4 routers which are in stock first.

Thank you to the 13 backers for their amazing patience as we figure this out. Your kits are currently ready to go and are just waiting on the routers to arrive. Once they are here we we’ll ship them out immediately!

We are attending Midwest Reprap Festival!

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Midwest Reprap Festival coming up soon! Hosted in Goshen, Indiana, The MRRF brings thousands of makers around the world to share their reprap (replicating rapid-prototying) projects. We’ll be there to show off the Mill One all the other awesome projects we’re working on, because we love 3D printing too.

This is the first time we are attending MRRF and we are super excited to be there this year. Will we be the only desktop CNC company there? We’ll see!

Want to attend? Admission is free, sign up for a ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2017-midwest-reprap-festival-mrrf2017-aka-mrrf-tickets-28382784673

Read more about previous years on Hackaday: http://hackaday.com/tag/midwest-reprap-festival/

 

Schedule:

FRIDAY March 24, 5pm – 10pm

Setup day and hangout day as in past events, with many people showing up and bringing in all their stuff to show off.  The event hall will open at 5pm and stay open until 10pm for setup for anyone coming to attend.  If you’re just coming to walk through you’re welcome to come friday as well!  Plenty of hang out time and meetups on Friday.  Feel free to wander out and grab food then come back and hang out.

SATURDAY March 25, 10am – 6pm

Doors open by 10am and let the show begin!

SATURDAY March 25, Noon – 6pm

We’ll have speakers and presenters throughout the day starting at noon giving talks on all things 3D printing and/or related.

INTERESTED IN GIVING A PRESENTATION?  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

SATURDAY March 25 7pm-9pm

Dinner for all registered attendees.  Chinese Buffet is where it’s at again, so come hungry!

SUNDAY March 26 10am – 5pm

Doors open by 10am.  There will be FPV Drone racing outdoors weather permitting and a few more presentations this year on Sunday.  Event ends 5pm and load out/cleanup afterwards.

 

 

Opening up open source hardware design at the CAD level

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We believe that a tool designed for everyone should be designed by everyone. The designs of the Mill One are constantly being improved to increase performance and ease of manufacture and assembly. However, keeping up our publicly available design files up to date has been a challenge, especially since we are so busy shipping orders.

This is the reason why we’re changing our designing workflow: to make our latest designs more accessible. This process will most likely take a few weeks, but it will be well worth the work.

While the Sienci Mill One has been completely designed on Solidworks, we are switching over our design systems to Onshape. Why? Well there’s a couple reasons.

1) Powerful, free CAD software on any device

Onshape allows users to access powerful CAD software on any internet connected device, whether it be a phone, tablet, or laptop. This means we can give access to our latest designs to the most amount of people. Users can copy and edit our designs through Onshape using either a free, full featured account (with those designs also being publicly available).

2) Version control and access to the latest designs

One of the advantages of running CAD on the cloud is that everything is saved automatically. No lost files. Full records of all the design changes that has happened over time. We will be able to see all the design changes which has happened with the Mill One, and if you are a Mill One owner, you will be able to find your version easily. If you’re curious about the work that we are doing to improve the Mill One, it will be easy to see them on Onshape.

As I mentioned above, updating our design files on Thingiverse and Github is often inconsistent and it can take several weeks. Every design file on Onshape will be the latest and can be downloaded in a wide variety of file formats (STL, DXF, IGES….).

Conclusion

I am really excited to explore all the new opportunities by opening up our designs on Onshape. It’ll be a bit of getting used to, but we are trying out all the new features and it’s been working great!

Not everything has been uploaded to Onshape yet, but you can check out the Sienci Mill One design document at https://cad.onshape.com/documents/f129a1cb4c9e4b8ba7c141fa/w/62929c10eab89bef61547fe5/e/cb2f6605819782348b72c551

Please note that Solidworks imports may not be editable, and we will be working on redrawing models so that they can be edited easily on Onshape.

Let us know what you think of this new system, and if you have any feedback, feel free to reach out to us on social media or through email!

 

 

 

 

New parts received

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New parts are in! We are working hard to start putting together a new batch of 120 units. We spent all day driving around picking up parts and visiting our manufacturers. New gantries, power supplies, cables, frames, rails, and fasteners are here ready to get kitted.

It was pretty interesting to have Chris drive in the snow with a couple hundred pounds of metal in the back trunk. Hopefully we’ll be able to afford a truck soon.

Sometime next week we plan on dropping them off at the warehouse so that we can have some more space in the garage.

I have gotten word from our router supplier in the UK that the Makita routers which will come with some of the kits will be shipped at the end of this week. We’re putting together the rest of the kits so that we are able to have them ready as soon as possible.

We’re also putting together the assembled Mill Ones from our Kickstarter as well, but we are still sourcing some packaging material to fit the machines in since they are quite large and heavy.

NBTC 2017

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Chris and I attended NBTC 2017 this year with the gang at the Conrad Centre. NBTC (National Business and Technology Conference) held at the Omni Hotel in Toronto. We got to hear lots of cool talks, attend workshops, and of course, meet lots of people.

A special congrats to Siobhan and and Daisy from our Enterprise Co-op cohort for becoming the two finalists for the Newcomers Entrepreneurship Challenge. Daisy was the one took home the $1000 prize at NBTC for her pitch for her rendering company Pxls.

Find out more about the conference at http://nbtc.nspire.org!

Who are our users?

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With survey data collected from our Kickstarter backers, we can now paint a picture on what type of people have purchased a Sienci Mill One. We asked every single backer (almost 90 people) to tell us what they do, and we compiled the data into groups for each industry. Here’s a pie chart that describes our user base:

As you can see, most users are in engineering, followed by software and art and design. It’s pretty amazing to see the diversity in the people who purchased a Mill One.

Now here’s a pie chart that divides people who are in industries that commonly use CNC technology vs those who do not.

For many of our users, the Mill One is their first foray into CNC milling, and it’s exciting to see that there are so many different types of people trying it out and making cool things. As a kit designed specifically to be simple and easy to use, based on our data, its easy to see that we’re making desktop CNCing more accessible!