Hey all, Chris here. It’s been a while since I’ve posted on the Blog, the last time was actually when we launched the LongMill MK2.5 which was posted nearly 2 years ago on May 10, 2024, so I hope my writing doesn’t come across as too rusty.

I’m glad to be writing to you all again, though in this case this will be the last time, as I wanted to let you know that I’ll be leaving Sienci Labs both as CTO and co-owner to begin a new chapter of my life. In light of this, I felt there was no way that I would be able to leave without at least attempting a final walk down memory lane so I could share with you some of the impacting experiences and community moments that stood out to me. So, if you’ll indulge me, I’ll do my best to capture these even though we all know there’s no way I’ll be able to summarize 10 years of all the time, energy, and passion I’ve put into building Sienci Labs from the ground-up, as well as all the time I’ve shared with so many of you through support emails, Facebook comments, Forum threads, calls, in-person meetups, Livestreams and more.

Before starting down memory lane though, here are some other housekeeping items that I should elaborate on first:

• Why am I leaving? As everyone knows life is complex and always shifting and sometimes you just have to embrace it. After much consideration I felt it would make sense for me to move on to other things at this stage in my life.
• Why also leave as an owner? This was the choice that I felt made the most sense. Andy and I both have built this company from the ground-up with no outside investment because we felt that those who own the company should be the ones involved in the day-to-day of building it. Since I was looking to move on, it felt like the right thing to also work with Andy to return all my ownership back to the company.
• How will this change things at Sienci? In my view you shouldn’t really see any change. This probably sounds weird for me to say since you’d imagine that one of the key co-founders leaving would make a larger impact, but from my perspective there are a couple key aspects that I feel makes this statement true. Firstly, from day one Andy and I have worked hard to establish and make known the key priorities of Sienci Labs, including community openness, open source, and accessibility, and I believe that by instilling these pillars in our team it ensures that these goals can continue on through each of them. Secondly, as my role at the company has evolved over the years, we’ve already brought on people to fill the gaps to much success between my input or mentorship and their own talents including engineering, packaging design, QA, documentation, marketing, video creation, etc. This past experience allows present-day transitions to happen quite smoothly when there’s good planning and communication. Lastly, to give more context to the second point, recently my efforts at the company have been in projects that have either now released or are shortly releasing including heading the gSender 1.5.0 ‘New U’ redesign, the original board design and firmware behind the SLB and all the related documentation, filling the gaps on the new gSender 1.6.0 release, handling transition back to the core grblHAL firmware, and then onboarding new talent to finish that work and handle future SLB work. This means I’m in a good spot to hand the reins of successful, long-term projects over to either Andy or other talented individuals we’ve brought on, and I have great confidence that they can continue from there.
• Should I still keep messaging you about Sienci stuff? Unfortunately no, I won’t be the right person to talk to anymore, but there are a lot of great and knowledgeable people you can always reach through Sienci customer support. We’ll also do our best to distribute this Blog post across our various channels so that people who might’ve gotten a reply from me recently on places like our Forum or Github should know to expect any future follow-ups to come from someone else on our team due to my departure.
• What are you moving on to? For now I’ll be taking a very long overdue break as well as looking after some family and friends, then we’ll see from there.

I hope that answers most of the important questions. From my view Sienci Labs is in good hands. The team is strong, the vision is clear, and though I’m sad to say goodbye I wish the absolute best for the company to continue building tools that empower creativity and innovation.

For anyone happy to finish reading here (as I know that the following reminiscing might only be interesting for certain groups of people), my final words would be: have a great week, be well, help others, enjoy CNCing, and remember that feedback will always encourage Sienci and other companies in the space to keep improving! (:

How This All Started

I’m sure that between videos and blog posts, anyone who’s followed our company from the start may already have a decent idea of the path we took to where we’re at now, so I’ll try to offer up some less-mentioned insights from my own experiences.

From my view, the birth of Sienci and its core tenants started from Andy and my immersion and thankfulness to the multitude of prior community-founded efforts towards the democratization and increase in accessibility of at-home manufacturing, and honestly just the broader ‘maker’ movement as a whole. This movement had achieved a much larger mass adoption since the late 90’s and early 2000’s and had made a large impact on both of our lives and our passion for making as we grew up. Little did we know that due to a combination of our experiences, some of Andy’s unique ideas, some handy grant programs, and lots of gumption and elbow grease, we’d find ourselves starting a company in a literal garage and use this opportunity to finally give back to this community we’d felt so grateful to be a part of.

Shout out to all those who still own an original Mill One!

All these years later, I still try to channel the original ambition we both held back in the day. We thought that within 5 years we’d be able to make a CNC that was so smart and easy to use that you’d only need to click a single button and it would make you your final part, the truest essence of ‘lights out manufacturing’. Of course this would prove much more difficult than we expected, but I’m still so glad that we had a bit of ignorance, essentially, in these early days because every technological effort needs to start somewhere. We also came to better understand that we needed to take more focused steps on our path to that final goal, and this wound up helping us to better understand the other essential parts of a business that make a product work and helps users to feel supported, like:

• Committed customer support
• Support documents and videos (fun fact, our original Mill One assembly video series was voiced by my father)
• Teaching software usage
• Providing user inspiration for projects
• And all the other parts of an ecosystem that transforms the experience from a transactional purchase to a fully supported journey.

It was a relief then when we finally found our financial footing through the feedback of our early community, who led us toward designing and launching the LongMill on Kickstarter. We’d been quite anxious because after several years it was still a real possibility that we’d have had to throw in the towel due to running very low on cash, and luckily the campaign helped us get back on track.

We were so grateful to see the whirlwind of responses and enthusiasm. I remember being so excited that I was more than happy to spend a late night putting together a video to answer a really common question we’d be getting of “can I use the LongMill vertically?”: https://youtu.be/Kpeo68LFmM0 (fun fact, this became one of our most watched videos over the next couple years, and a couple months later we also had fun standing on the machine while it was running)

How Sienci Has Grown

Skipping from those first 3 formative years to present day, 10 years after we began this whole journey, I can’t help but feel like a proud father who’s watched their child grow up, and look back in fondness despite the arduous journey. Back in the day, the first full-time people that joined our team were pivotal since money was tight and there was lots to do with little margin for error, but it became such a nice flow once we got past 5, then 10, then 20. The extra hands meant we were able to invest so much more time into the things we cared about like higher quality control, more reliable machine availability, and more resources of higher quality to assemble and learn how to use our CNCs. We also we able to allot more budget into much more complex R&D efforts like custom extrusion designs, gSender (to this day, one of my proudest projects I’ve ever undertaken), better electronics, enhanced firmware features, and eventually even larger machines and more complex add-ons like lasers, rotary axes, novel touch plates, and even custom cutting tools. We’re also now a team of almost 60.

It’s also been amazing to see our great community of CNCers grow alongside us. It’s not typical to have such a helpful group of people all together in one place, and I’m proud to have been joined by many of you in fostering that over the years on both our Facebook group and our Forum. I think it’s great that we can act to not only help those with our machines, but also welcome those from other areas of the CNC community since I’ve always felt that a rising tide lifts all boats. I dug up an old screenshot that I took when I was so excited our Facebook group was about to hit one thousand members, and it’s amazing to see us now past 15k, plus several thousand more on the Forum, and many Github contributors who we’re so happy and grateful to be working alongside. Our community also easily covers the globe now, spanning all continents (except Antarctica) and even some countries I’d never imagined we’d be in including remote islands in the middle of the Pacific ocean!

I also want to give a personal shoutout and thanks to some group contributors (and our amazing Forum moderator) who I’ve greatly appreciated chatting alongside through many years in: Grant W, Don R, Jim H, Francis M, Matt M, Bill I, Michael P, Ian G, Heyward O, Bill K, Jeff W, Edwin S, James D, Greg D, Greg C, Jeremy F, Tomek, Tex, John O, Neil F, Ed B, Jens, and Chucky (sorry if I missed anyone else). Anyone who’s been around for a while will probably recognize these individuals for their many contributions toward either answering questions, contributing ideas or code, fending off spam bots, and even bringing some of their own designs to the community; thank you all for all your help along the way, I can say it was a great pleasure working with you.

Other Favourite Parts

I thought maybe I could use the list below as a ‘reflection quick-fire round’ to finish rounding out things that I couldn’t neatly fit into my longer, and perhaps more rambly, prose:

• Manually bagging nuts and bolts in our original unheated garage during the Canadian winter (though I don’t know why I look back at it so fondly)
• Interviewing with Joel Telling (and a couple years later Thomas Sanladerer) and just generally going to MRRF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyvEPXgMqos&t=1120s

• Going to many other local community and maker meetups and woodworking shows
• Seeing the first video review of one of our machines (Mill One) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTZpAUE9PO4 
• Being featured twice on Make: Magazine
• Using our CNCs to cut some of my own, nice home decorations and a camera dolly
• Getting gifts from others in the community of projects they made or nice material blanks they wanted to pass along
• Seeing our machines go into high schools and universities and maker spaces around the world (as someone who’s always loved to see the improvement and modernization of children’s education)
• Getting to work with local Beta tester on all our wacky R&D efforts over the years

• Going back to some good ‘ol calculus and geometry to generate a lot of the probing movements and math behind the CAM generation tools in gSender
• Launching the SuperLongBoard, alongside all the recent gSender efforts we’d put in, with a lot of effort by the team and to great reception

• Seeing all the machine mods and accessories that were released for our machines over the years (including all the unique, personalized dust shoe designs)
• Releasing gSender New U, and working toward grblHAL Core feature parity
• Celebrating Sienci’s 10 year anniversary with many familiar faces (this was a picture of some of our team from earlier in the year for Halloween)

The Wider Impact I’ve Seen

One thing I forgot to mention earlier is that, though we started Sienci with large ambitions, our underlying goal was to have as big an impact as we could on the hobby CNC space, and I feel confident saying that we’ve done that. This came from a place of what I’d call frustration, knowing what options were out there, how much people were being charged, and how unintuitive many CNCs were to use, we really hoped that we could at least become large enough in the CNC space that others couldn’t help but pay attention to what we were doing and follow-suit with improvements of their own.

All this is to say that I’m going to use this section to brag a little bit and be proud of our accomplishments. Please don’t take what I’ve written here as false attribution or an exhaustive list, this is simply my own list of what I believe to be unique ideas that I feel relatively confident that we either created or popularized in the industry:

• Pushing down pricepoint on higher performance
  • I wouldn’t say we were necessarily the first to do this since much can be owed to projects before us like Shapeoko and OpenBuilds, but I do feel that our presence in the ‘second wave’ continued this push toward faster and higher build quality machines for lower costs.
• ‘Baseless machines’
  • A philosophy we helped popularize with the idea being that we could save cost for many shop owners that already had money put into a sturdy table that they could mount the machine to, rather than paying extra for a separate frame, which has since been further adapted by others like Onefinity and FoxAlien.
• Focus on strong community collaboration
  • This one is harder to gage, but I do feel strongly that one of our core company philosophies of keeping a very tight loop between community feedback and the planning of our next steps means that we’ve essentially been able to better empower the CNC community itself into having say over the future of what it wants to see.
• Championing open source
  • We’ve always felt two things, first that people shouldn’t have proprietary lock-in to the hardware or software that they choose to use or spend their money on, and second that if we truly want to keep pushing the hobby CNC space forward then we shouldn’t be scared to share all our work out in the open for others to see and iterate on. The result I feel is a win for everyone, and I hope that more companies in our space would follow suit (though shoutout to other great ambassadors like V1E and Maslow), since we’ve now seen time and again the power and creativity that can come from enabling those within the community to keep moving towards the next steps in technology (something much more visible in the 3D printing space).
• gSender
  • A sending software wasn’t the innovation here, I think it was just the relentless focus on both creating new features that made it feel like the CNC was smarter than it was, while trying to keep it neatly packaged up to be as intuitive as possible. In the early days we certainly got tidbits of inspiration from other senders out there, but I think now that we’ve found our footing it’s been very rewarding to see our novel work and efforts feed back into other senders like UGS, MillMage, ncSender, Genmitsu control, and the Redline controller. I think this will continue to be especially true after our recent 1.5.0 full redesign as there are aspects there that I feel so confident are the future of easier CNCing like our Configuration tab, Helper tool, and Machine Stats, but in the meantime here’s a list of some other specific concepts we brought to the table: touch plate continuity checks, start from line, file stream interruption recognition, seamless incremental-to-continuous jogging, rapid-normal-precise jogging presets, built-in grbl tool-changing support, workaround for full rotary axis control on vanilla grbl CNCs, maintenance reminders, background app waking stops computer falling asleep during cutting, triangle calibration tool, and a recognized CNCs list.
• AutoZero
  • Still to-date the only touch plate I’m aware of that can probe nearly the full spectrum of common cutting tools.
• SuperLongBoard
  • This project had to do with bringing the hobby CNC space into its 32-bit era as well as proving the usefulness of adaption systems that can upgrade older machines, and though there have actually been many that came before us, I do feel that our unique take of offering a user-friendly solution in an open-source and well documented package has been able to progress the concept much further.
• Vortex
  • This is still not a solved issue, but we noticed two issues related to rotary/4th-axes in the hobby CNC space. First is that there’s certainly demand for it, and second is that it’s caught in a chicken-or-egg scenario where machine makers are waiting for easy-to-use software to exist and software makers are waiting for the machines to exist. I felt very proud to be one of the first to break this standstill and make the first step to put out an inexpensive rotary with many novel innovations like the quick-lock tailstock so that we could start to show demand, and we were all so happy once this started more momentum in seeing companies like Vectric be spurred to continue their work on improving rotary handling or Onefinity who followed suit with also releasing a rotary product.
• AltMill, AutoSpin, upcoming ATC, and 4×8
  • This is now me putting the cart a bit before the horse since these are either still new to the market or pending shipping, but I do feel very excited and confident at all the unique things these new offerings will be bringing to the hobby market and really hope their impact will be large and widely felt. Pushing price-to-performance ratio on larger machines, offering essentially a spindle as nearly router prices, building so much more intelligence into a consumer ATC at such a low pricepoint, and bringing a 4×8 into the space also at an amazing pricepoint and still shipped through standard mail are all insane steps and I can’t wait to see what will follow next.

There were also a few other projects that I undertook or lead that maybe weren’t as game-changing but I’m proud to look back on accomplishing:

• Co-creating the Mill One and LongMill V1
• Leading creation of the LongMill V2, V3, V4, V4b, MK2, and MK2.5
• Designing LongMill MK1 dust shoe, MK1 magnetic dust shoe, MK2 magnetic dust shoe, and MK2 dust sheilds
• Creating/establishing Sienci’s whole resources documentation system/area, Facebook group, and User Forum
• Designing and leading our novel software toolchain suggestion wizard
• CAMLab (a foray into simplified, online CAM)
• Establishing Sienci’s entire assembly instruction design language, colouring, and look and feel through many iterations over the years along with our approach to long-form, personable videos for assembly, tours, and updates

Thank You

Thank you for your trust in us when we were just a couple of people with a dream and a garage full of prototypes. Thank you for your patience when things broke, your excitement when things worked, and your belief that we were building something worthwhile. Thank you for every message, every photo, every project, every suggestion, and every moment you shared. This has been an amazing journey for me and has shaped me as an engineer, as a leader, and as a person.

I’ll carry these memories – both the good and the hard ones – into whatever comes next. Know that though I may be stepping away from Sienci Labs, I’ll always be cheering on each one of you, the continued success of Sienci, and the wider progression of the CNC space as a whole.

If I can also make one final request: if I missed anything in all my above recollections, please do let me know in the comments of anywhere this blog gets posted as I’d love to be reminded of it. Please also share any of your own experiences you’ve had with me, pictures of your setups, or any other way you’ve felt impacted as I’d be very grateful to carry that forward with me as a memento.

Be well, and continue to enjoy making and sharing,

– Chris

Hi everyone, as you guys may know, we had been working with ESA on the safety compliance for the VFDs in 2025, which was eventually completed for sales in Ontario. We are now working with ESA on the compliance for power supplies used in LongMill and AltMill products within Ontario. For customers outside of Ontario, feel free to skip this notice, as this is only limited to within Ontario. If you are within Ontario trying to make an order for the LongMill or AltMill, you may receive a notice at checkout.

Starting April 29th, we’ll be pausing sales for the LongMill and AltMill for customers in Ontario. Please read further on specific plans for each machine.

LongMill MK2.5

Given that we have a small number of machines left for the LongMill MK2.5, it’s likely that we will be clearing out of this stock before having a prepared power supply. However, the upcoming LongMill MK3 which is expected launch soon, and will be safety compliant for use and sale in Ontario.

AltMill

Since we are expecting to continue production and development of the AltMill, we have been working on a new power supply design around the safety compliance over the last few months. Based on our development timelines, we expect this to be complete around August 2026.

What if I am in Ontario with an AltMill or LongMill already?

Based on our conversations with ESA and certification agencies, no current action is needed for users within Ontario. If any action is needed, we will contact you directly.

What if I am in Ontario and want to purchase an AltMill or LongMill?

Please contact us directly for additional support as we may be able to provide you with a one off power supply for temporary use that is safety compliant or hold your order until certified power supplies are ready to ship.

Hey everyone!

It’s been a little while since we’ve talked about what’s going on under the hood of the SuperLongBoard (SLB), and today we’ve got some exciting news for those of you who like to live on the bleeding edge.

We are looking for a small group of AltMill and LongMill owners to help us beta test the new “Main” version of the grblHAL firmware.

If you’re interested in helping us test this out, you can fill out the Google Form linked at the bottom of this post. But first, a little history lesson on how we got here, why this change matters, and what you can expect.

A Quick History Lesson: SienciHAL vs. Main

When we first launched the SLB, we made the decision to fork the firmware into our own specific flavour, which we affectionately called “SienciHAL.”

At the time, we needed to make sure the firmware was rock-solid and perfectly tailored to the specific hardware we were building. We needed to guarantee stability for our users right out of the gate, and having our own branch allowed us to lock things down and ensure everything behaved exactly how we wanted it to for launch.

However, maintaining a separate fork means you miss out on all the cool new stuff happening in the wider world of grblHAL development. Over the last year, we’ve been working closely with the original creator of grblHAL (Terje) and the community to bring our specific needs and features into the Main branch of the firmware.

Our goal has always been to contribute to the open-source ecosystem, not just take from it. By working to get our changes merged into the main project, we ensure that the SLB remains compatible with future developments while being able to contribute any potential improvements back to the community.

What’s New in this Firmware?

For the most part, if we’ve done our job right, you won’t notice a huge difference in how your machine cuts. The motion and reliability should feel just as solid as before. However, moving to the Main branch unlocks some nice quality-of-life improvements and future-proofing features – examples being:

Automatic Motor Alarm Reset: One of the small but mighty changes. It makes recovering from motor alarms much smoother without needing to power cycle or mash reset buttons as frantically.

SD Card Support: We are unlocking support for SD card reading, which opens the door for running files directly from the board and other advanced standalone features down the road.

Advanced Plugin Support: This firmware includes support for the plugins we’ve developed for our ATC (Automatic Tool Changer) spindle. We also hope that these features will be helpful for anyone setting up their own automatic tool change system on any machine running grblHAL.

Under-the-hood Tweaks: A lot of small improvements to stability and code efficiency that come from the collective brainpower of the open-source community. This firmware version also exposes the ability to change many other settings and features such as LED brightness and ‘jerk’ motion control.

Who Should Test This? (And Who Shouldn’t)

We are looking for AltMill and LongMill users who are relatively comfortable with flashing firmware and using gSender.

This is beta firmware. While it has been tested to the best of our abilities and equipment, there is naturally a risk of bugs or unexpected behaviour.

It is not recommended to participate in beta testing if you’re in the middle of a critical production run or have a deadline to meet.

DO sign up if you enjoy tinkering, don’t mind providing feedback, and want to help us polish the next generation of our software stack!

For Interested Beta Testers

If you’re interested in beta testing, please fill out the Google Form below. We will be selecting a limited number of users to start with to ensure we can provide adequate support and gather focused feedback. If selected, we’ll email you the firmware file and instructions on how to flash it to your SLB.

For Everyone Else Interested

For anyone interested in upgrading without beta testing, an officially supported public release of the new grblHAL main firmware will be made available in the coming months, shipping with new machines as well. We will announce this in a subsequent blog post and on social posts.

We’ve also been working to coordinate to have a ‘Webbuilder’ accessible grblHAL machine profile accessible that will allow advanced users to configure their version of this firmware any way they’d like to.

We are incredibly grateful for open-source projects like grblHAL. They are the backbone of what makes affordable, high-performance CNC machining possible for hobbyists and small businesses. We want to do our part to support and contribute to these projects wherever possible, and moving our users to the Main branch is a huge step in that direction.