Bittele has let us down again and in turn I feel like I have let you the customer down. The 200 drivers we received from Bittele were thoroughly tested and were found to be 1oz boards again. We waited a long time for them to rectify their first mistake and have the components moved from the old 1oz boards to new 2oz boards but again we received 1oz boards.
How we tested this:
1oz copper drivers can only provide about 2.5A or 4W of optical laser power and those are the exact values we found when testing these new drivers
Next we took samples from 2oz copper boards, 1oz copper boards and the boards we just received under a magnifying tool and we found they match the copper from the 1oz copper. (Top – 1oz copper, middle – boards we received, bottom – 2oz copper)
Next we did a 4 point measurement test to get a more solid comparison with the 2oz copper boards, 1oz copper boards and the boards we just received. These measurements so the clear difference in a 2oz copper driver and the ones we just received.
Our last test was to guarantee the issues we saw came from the copper and not any components, so we took a 2oz pcb and we swapped all electronic components from the boards we received to the 2oz pcb and this driver worked perfectly. This showed us that the parts were fine and it is 100% a 1oz copper pcb
What are we doing about it?
As you know, we decided to order drivers from Makerfabs just in case anything like this happened. We did, they have shipped 200 drivers and they are currently going through customs clearance in a local sorting facility. We have provided POA this morning and have our invoices ready to be provided as soon as they are requested from us. The estimated delivery date in June 1st but DHL has a tendency to drag customs clearance, so I will be on the phone with them multiple times a day until we get it cleared.
We will go through the same testing process above to make sure they are true 2oz copper driver pcbs and we will ship as soon as they pass testing. Andy pointed out that as soon as those Bittele drivers failed their first test I should have taken a day to update you all, I will make it a point to delivery even the worse news in a more timely manner. We are in the same situation here as I am not happy until you have received your LaserBeam orders and I will not stop working until I get it done.
Hey everyone, the assembly videos for the LongMill MK2 are now live on our Youtube channel. To watch the videos, please visit our Youtube playlist. These assembly videos provide just shy of 5 hours of viewing content, which goes through the nuances of assembling your machine.
Of course, if you get tired of Chris’ commentary, we have an excellent instruction manual as well.
A few weeks ago, Leandro, Scott, and I went over to visit Dale and interview him about his experience with the LongMill. It was a fantastic and fun trip for all of us, especially spending time with a fun character like Dale. Here’s our interview!
About the beta testing program
Just as a quick intro about the beta testing program, at the end of last year, we recruited three different people of different backgrounds and skill levels in our area to test the LongMill MK2. At this point, we were at the final stages of our development for the MK2 and were looking to iron out the rest of the kinks to finalize the production of a few of the parts. All beta testers paid for their machines, albeit with a small discount. Each beta tester volunteered their time and space to observe and interview them at each step of the process as well as testing prototype and production parts as they were made to update their machines.
Working with Dale
It has been so fun to work with Dale. Just as a background, we would consider Dale a “superuser”. Dale initially had the LongMill MK1 in his shop that was used regularly for his side business. You might also recognize him as a very helpful and active member of our Facebook Group as well.
Because we knew how much he was using his MK1 and how long and intricate many of his projects were, we knew that Dale would really put the MK2 through its paces. And this happened to be true, especially as he took this opportunity to transition from working a job for someone else and transitioning to working full time for himself.
As someone who’s more focused on building, engineering, and selling CNC machines, it’s really satisfying to meet people like Dale who’ve gone from working a regular 9-5 and being able to work for themselves and express their creativity in their craft using our machines.
Dale is now also beta testing the extension kit on his original MK1 machine. We’re looking forward to all the new creations that’ll be coming down his pipleline!
After a very long wait, we finally have our first set of LaserBeam drivers that have been shipped to us today and we are excited for them to arrive so we can test, assemble and ship orders.
In order to save time we had Bittele begin shipping partial orders as they were completed. Our first partial order will be 135 drivers that were shipped express earlier today and expected to arrive Friday 20th. If they arrive on time, I will test each driver over the weekend so we can begin assembly and shipping orders next week. I will work as many hours as needed to ensure 135 orders are shipped by Friday 27th.
There are currently 165 LaserBeam orders in the queue and we will be receiving more partial driver orders before the end of the month in order to finish fulfilling the queue of orders.
Going forward, over the next few weeks we will receive another 265 drivers (not including this first 135 drivers) and another 400 drivers from MakerFabs. This gives us enough stock for the rest of the year, which gives us time to continue to streamline the supply chain, make more informational laser videos, start posting replacement parts on the shop and design other products around the LaserBeam ecosystem.
As always, we appreciate the support and patience.
A common query we get here at Sienci Labs is “What should I order with my LongMill?”. We’ve created a new step-by-step configurator to help customers figure out what they should be ordering with the LongMill. The LongMill MK2 Configurator covers all of the add-ons and toolings that we feel are relevant for someone getting set up with a new machine, as well as providing better info and transparency of what each item does.
Why this matters to us
One of the interesting results of being in control of how the order page looks on our website is that it influences the purchasing decisions of our customers and changes what is and isn’t easily visible to the customer. The consequence of this is that most of our customers purchase all of the add-ons we have on the product page, even though some of these items may not be needed for most beginners.
For example, we typically do not recommend beginner users to use or install inductive sensors until they have gained some experience using the machine. For the dust shield, we also don’t feel it is required for most customers. However, more than 50% of customers choose these options as default. Although it means more money in our pocket at the end of the day, we would prefer customers to be able to purchase the things they need and have the best experience possible.
Another result of this layout is that there are some confusion and order changes that happen, as we don’t list all of our add-ons on the product page. For example, we have our regular touch plate on the list, but not our AutoZero touch plate. Many customers have ended up getting in touch with us to change their regular touch plate to the AutoZero touch plate. With an improved system like the configurator, we can lay out more options and give people the opportunity to compare their options more easily, as well as reduce the overall clutter of the page.
We’re hoping that this improves overall customer and ordering experience, while better informing customers on what they need with their machine.
Depending on the reception of the configurator, we may implement it on other products, like the LaserBeam and LongMill Extension kits. If you have any thoughts or feedback, feel free to reach out and let us know!
Hey everyone, here’s our May 2022 production update.
Overall production continues to move along smoothly and machines are going out the door at a good pace. In a good way, we don’t have too much to report on.
Lead times for LongMill MK2 12×30 and 30×30 orders
We’re excited to be getting through the rest of the queue on the LongMill MK2 12×30 and 30×30 orders sooner than expected. Patrik and the rest of the packing crew have now pushed out over 400 machines over the last four weeks, and are expecting to complete the rest of the queue sometime next week. This means that new orders should ship in 2-3 weeks placed today.
Incoming materials and production
Production has been moving along slowly without part shortages. Once the queue is complete, we are expecting to have enough parts to pre-pack and ship another 70 machines with the gantries and steel parts that we currently have. Another batch of these parts is expected to arrive in about 2 weeks, so we believe that we’ll be able to continue packing and shipping as orders come. After these parts arrive, we’ll have plenty of material to keep us busy for the next 2-3 months.
It’s been a while since this has happened, but we’re now at the point where our production capacity is exceeding our demand, and our goal is to get things packed up and ready to go as more folks get their machines and word on the LongMill MK2 continues to spread.
Some other general news
Our company is growing. We have a couple of new people joining our team in marketing, operations, and engineering! We’re also working on hiring new folks for software development and customer support.
The LongMill MK2 assembly video is being edited now and we are expecting it to go live in the next week or two.
Hey everyone, just wanted to let everyone know that the completed order emails with the tracking information issue from last week have been resolved and the site is operating as normal. Customers should now continue to be getting emails with their tracking numbers as their orders are complete and shipped.
If you had an order during this time period, we sent the tracking order manually as they were shipped. If you didn’t get one, please feel free to contact us. You can check if your order has been shipped and where it is in the queue with our Order Status page.
Customers with order numbers 39363 and higher, or orders placed after April 28th, should see the tracking numbers emailed as normal automatically.
Thank you everyone for their patience, we’re glad this has now been resolved.
So what happened exactly
It appears that starting from April 14th, completed order emails for some orders (specifically for the ones that are for LongMill MK2s) were not being sent. We were not aware of the issue until we returned from our long Easter weekend. Our current system has been set up to send emails in several different stages:
When we receive your order: an email is sent to the customer when the order has been created and successfully paid for. If there is an issue with your payment you will get a different email to notify you.
When we complete and ship your order: an email is sent when the order is ready for pick up (which comes with instructions and times that your order can be picked up) or has been shipped (which comes with tracking info as well as additional info about duties and taxes).
In some cases, there may be additional emails, such as for software licenses and if we need to notify you of packing status.
At first, we checked the status of different plugins of the site, as updates were done on different areas to see if there were any changes to the site between the 14th and 18th. However, there were no changes to the plugins during this time, and reverting back to older versions of the plugins for testing did not fix the issue.
First, we received some error notifications from the site, citing some issues with the software license system. However, the issue was still not fixed after testing with the system disabled and rolled back.
Next, we also started receiving error notifications in parsing code in the code used to generate the emails. At first glance, the HTML was correct and was code that had been used previously for a long time. However, we found that the PHP version was updated on April 14th, which may be causing issues with parsing HTML in this case. Removing this code has fixed this issue, and the emails are now being sent without the parsing error.
We have reverted the email to the same format as previously through another method for customizing emails, which we expect will help keep the system working in future updates.
Hey everyone, here’s just a quick update about the production here at Sienci.
By the way, we are having a livestream on Youtube tomorrow, if you’d like to be part of it, we’ll be live at noon (EST) on Friday April 22! This livestream will cover some of the development work happening at Sienci Labs as well as a bunch of stuff about the LongMill MK2.
Shipping
We’ve been working hard to get as many machines out the door as quickly as possible. Now, at the time of writing, we’ve just about shipped 250 machines. Our support team has been reporting that issues have been fairly low and comments about the machine have been overall very positive! If you’d like to follow along on our progress, feel free to check out our page here: https://sienci.com/order-status.
We’re expecting to keep up with packing as we are currently. Please make sure to stay tuned for more updates.
We’ve recently run into an issue (since April 18th) where shipping notifications for LongMill MK2 orders are not being sent. All other email notifications for orders (parts, bits, and other products) are being sent, and the only orders that are being impacted are the ones with LongMill MK2s. In the meantime, we are sending out the notifications manually, so please keep an eye out for them. We are continually working on fixing this issue, and if your order is showing completed on our Order Status page, please get in touch with us for the tracking info.
We suspect that there may be some bugs with the system as there was some updates that happened around this time. We’ll continue monitoring the emails being sent out so that we can keep folks updated as best as we can.
We are also experiencing some issues with auto-syncing orders with the Order Status page, so we have been updating it throughout the day. Please note that there may be a bit of delay day to day on the status of the items on the page until we fix the system.
Incoming materials
We’ve now reached the first 500 machines sold for Batch 6, which means that we are now about a third of the way through. We currently are stocking 1500 machines worth of parts, with the exception of the rails and the gantries. We initially ordered 500 sets of rails and gantries to start the batch and we’ve placed another batch of those parts to come in soon.
Materials for rails which were slated for early June arrival have been completed early and are expected to be delivered to us soon. Some will be here tomorrow and some will be here next week. This also covers the rails we need for the 48×30 machines and extension kits, which means that we’ll be starting prepping and cutting for those orders as well.
Gantry plates and feet are in production currently, and we are expecting all of them to be cut, formed, and painted at the start to middle of May. Once those parts are available, these parts will be used for machines for the next 500 units.
Initially, we were expecting to start shipping machines after the first 500 in June, but it looks like we’ll be able to chug along with production without interruptions.
This update is for all LaserBeam customers that have not received their orders.
Most of you probably know that we have been dealing with supply chain delays for the past 3 months and recently that delay came to an end. That is the good news, copper heatsinks and power supplies arrived and the laser diode assemblies have been assembled.
The bad news is Bittele, our pcb manufacturer, manufactured our drivers on 1oz copper pcbs instead of our requested 2oz copper pcbs. This will cause a delay for LaserBeam orders shipping out.
The details:
We cannot ship out drivers with 1oz pcbs, this will cause the voltage regulator and other key components to operate out of safe specifications
Bittele and their team is committed to rectifying this mistake
This will delay the driver shipment by 20-25 days which delays the LaserBeams shipping out
What we are doing about this:
Bittele has been instructed to remake all pcbs with 2oz copper
Bittele has been instructed to disassemble all components from the 1oz copper pcbs
Bittele has been instructed to reorder all generic capacitors and resistors that cannot be disassembled from the 1oz copper pcbs
We will place a completely new order for 200 assembled drivers with PCBway in the hope that they can potentially manufacture and ship drivers before Bittele can.
Both this new order and our delayed order will give us 6 months of driver stock so that we can avoid this type of delay from ever happening again.
Like always, if you cannot wait for the new drivers to arrive for any reason. Please send in a ticket requesting a refund, we completely understand. Feel free to reorder when we begin shipping product. I appreciate the support of all customers.
I’m happy to announce that the LongMill MK2s are now shipping! We received our container last week and have started shipping since. Here’s some customer feedback from one of the first people to pick it up:
MK2 Production
At this current time, we now have enough materials on hand to ship around 500 machines. Our team continues to pack and assemble kits as quickly as we can. At the time of writing, we’ve gotten 48 machines shipped out since last Thursday.
For general updates on where your order is on the list, please see our Order Status page. An estimated time for shipping can also be found on the page. We are aiming to average around 50 machines shipped per week. Please note that this number can vary a lot depending on staff availability and production schedules. Please also note that this is an average we are shooting for, but the number may vary day-to-day, as some days we may be able to ship more than others. Because of this, we cannot provide exact dates on when machines will ship for each order, but an email will be sent the week before your order is ready to ship to let you prepare and let you know that things are heading your way.
I’ve updated the estimated time to completion on our Order Status page to reflect our expected delivery times. Please make sure to check it out for our latest estimate on when your machine will ship.
We are expecting the first week to be a little bit slower and for things to pick up as we keep packing since some of our new packing material which was designed to improve our packing speed has not arrived yet and we are using general off-the-shelf material in the meantime. The new packing material is expected to arrive this week, but it has previously been pushed back a few times and it hasn’t been clear the exact delivery date due to cardboard shortages.
Materials
We now currently have the material needed to build the next 500ish machines, which means that we have everything we need to cover all of the machines in queue currently. We are still waiting on some additional packing material to arrive, but for the time being, we’ve substituted final production packaging with some off-the-shelf materials we were able to use in the meantime.
After the first 500 units, we’ll be waiting on another batch of gantries and rails to arrive, which is expected to arrive between the end of April and the start of June. The arrival of these materials is likely to affect our lead times down the line.
Purchasing for materials for Batch 7 has also started, which should put us around August-September when we’ll start Batch 7.
LaserBeam
Power supplies and heatsinks for the LaserBeam have arrived, and we are currently packing and assembling kits. Here’s one of our staff putting together the laser and heatsinks.
We’re expecting to start shipping the kits out at the end of the week this week or the start of next week. Ikenna is waiting on Bittele to wrap up the PCB assembly to finish up the drivers on Thursday. There were some delays due to chip and parts shortages for the assembly, but the boards have started fabrication last week. We’ll have around 400 new drivers arriving to wrap up the production for the rest of the LaserBeams.
Other general updates
Chris has made a lot of progress in the assembly instructions for the MK2 machines. Make sure to check it out in the resources. Thank you Aleks for being part of this project as well!
I also wanted to share some pics of the new power supply:
You can see that when you cut it open (I used an angle grinder), it is completely encapsulated. Although this is pretty overkill, this construction will basically make the power supply impervious to dust and moisture.
Did you see our April Fools video?
Ikenna initially suggested the idea of making a lasergun using the LaserBeam. I thought that it was a great idea so I put one together.
Assembly of the Not-a-LaserGun
The Not-a-LaserGun was partially inspired also by the Not-a-Flamethrower, which was a flamethrower created by Elon Musk.
Basically, the Not-a-LaserGun takes the LaserBeam diode assembly and driver assembly and replaces the power supply with a 12V 8A battery to allow the user to use the laser on battery power. Everything was then put into a case that was 3D printed in multiple parts. An Arduino was used to generate an on-signal when the trigger is fired.
The result of this was basically a super-powerful laser pointer that can burn stuff.
Extension Kits and MK2 48x30s
We now have three people with the extension kits. Dale, Garrett, and Dana. These guys also all have MK2 machines as well, so they will be able to compare the MK1 and MK2 as well. So far, the response has been very positive, with very few issues with the overall setup. There are a few kinks to work out however which include
Proper defaults and integration on gSender
Testing and finalizing designs for wire management
Instructions and other resources for assembly and use
We’ve asked our users and testers to start extending their MK1 machines since…well this is what I said:
We also just got in the aluminum part to adapt the new T12 nuts for the T8 spacing (used on the MK1 machines).
Please keep an eye out for further development updates and other feedback!
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