Category: General News

I hope that everyone who came out to Hamilton Maker Faire this year had as much as a blast as we did. It was a toasty 30 degrees Celsius yesterday and Amy (who helped out for the day) and I got up around 8am to begin the 1 hour drive from Waterloo to Hamilton. Once we arrived, we set up our booth inside the Electric Pumphouse building, including our little shop of parts.

It’s really see how far we’ve come since the last time we were at Maker Faire Hamilton a year ago. At that time, we had built a few prototypes of what would become the Mill One, but were still quite a ways away from completing the testing and design of the V1 machines. Desktop CNC milling at that time was still quite an unknown technology. This year, however, we met a lot of folks who had been following our progress or had already purchased a Mill One from us.

We also had a chance to talk to many makers about their projects and their own personal roadblocks in manufacturing, whether it was time, money, skill, or something else, which gives us ideas on how we can help makers turn their ideas into reality. We also had many great discussions on what the future of making will look like and how our industry will change over the next few decades.

I’d like to thank Amy for coming out to help me, everyone who came out to Hamilton Maker Faire 2017, as well as all the amazing organizers and volunteers! Thank you so much! Until next year!

Mark your calendars, because Hamilton Maker Faire is coming up this Sunday, June 11th in Hamilton Ontario. Hamilton Maker Faire will bring together hundreds of makers to share projects and ideas, and we’ll be there to show off the Mill One V2. Learn more at the event page on Facebook.

We were there last year with our early prototypes of the Mill One, and got awesome feedback and support. It’ll be a lot of fun to go back with our newest Mill One and show off how much progress we’ve made since then. We also look forward to meeting lots of new people and exploring different projects happening in the community.

A couple of highlights

• Lots and lots of 3D printers
• Amazing art projects and things for sale
• A blacksmith showing off his forging skilss
• A tour of the giant steam pumps

We look forward to seeing everyone there!

 

It’s been awesome to see what users on the Sienci Mill One Group on Facebook have been up to, especially with the mods that they have been making to improve the performance of the Mill One, as well as pushing the machine to its furthest extents. One example of this is Eddie’s latest endeavour to cut aluminum at 0.1″ or 2.54mm depth of cut at 5 in/min (127mm/min) to 8in/min (203mm/min) with a 3/8″ (9.525mm) end mill.

While the feedrates are fairly slow, it’s cool to see the Mill One taking substantial chunks of aluminum out per pass. Based on some quick calculations on http://www.productivity.com/resources/calculators/, Eddie was able to achieve a material removal rate nearly 10x higher that with a 1/8″ bit at 0.1mm depth of cut at 1000mm/min.

You can see in this video where Eddie is making some chips and get a sense of what’s going on in the machine. Also, make sure to note some of the unique mods he’s made.

https://www.facebook.com/edmundo.pasaoa/videos/10155168338150985/

With the improved rigidity made to the Mill One V2 coming soon, we look forward to seeing how much further folks will be able to take the Mill One and test the limits of the design.

https://www.facebook.com/edmundo.pasaoa/videos/10155176685070985/

 

At this point we’ve shipped over a hundred Mill Ones, giving us a good look at how reliable our machines are and the quality of the parts that go into it. We’ve done our best to provide the best service to our customers as possible, and have made sure to help everyone get the most out of their CNC machines. This helped us learn a lot about designing parts for reliability and choose the highest quality parts to continually improve the Mill One.

Our goal is to provide the best quality parts, as well as the best service to make sure our users can focus their time on making, without having to worry about troubleshooting and other technical details. Our V2 batch will use parts from suppliers who have shown to provide the highest quality parts from our previous manufacturing run.

While we’ve unofficially provided exceptional support to all our customers, we now have established an official warranty and return plan for Mill One kits which outlines what services we can provide.

Mill One Warranty

 

One of the most daunting parts about owning a CNC machine is choosing which end mills to use. There are literally thousands of tools for every single application, some which cost a dollar or two, and some that can cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. But when you learn about how end mills are designed and what to look for, picking a end mill can be no problem at all.

We’ve added an additional resource page to help new users navigate through picking and choosing end mills, check it out here.

https://sienci.com/choosing-end-mills/

 

People ask us questions. A lot of questions. We’ve made a new FAQ to help you answer some of the questions you might have.

Have a burning question or want us to add something to the FAQ? Shoot us an email at hi@sienci.com!

https://sienci.com/resources/faq/

 

Sienci Mill One V2

The next generation Mill One V2 includes some exciting new improvements, building upon what we learned with our first generation desktop CNC.

These new improvements include performance improvements and easier assembly, and provide a better overall CNCing experience.

Production and Lead Time

Parts for the Mill One V2 are in stock and are in the process of being packaged for shipping. We are currently working on completing the assembly resources for the Mill One V2, as well as finalizing the manufacturing of some outer packaging materials.

We should begin shipping out these units in early June, although it is possible to start shipping at the end of May if everything goes smoothly.

Ordering

The Mill One V2 can be pre-ordered right now at https://sienci.com/product/sienci-mill-one-kit/.

Improvements

There are quite a few improvements made to the Mill One V2, some of which are listed below.

Sheet Metal Frame Brackets

Rather than using four 3D printed frame brackets, the Mill One now comes with eight steel frame brackets positioned at each corner, providing greater rigidity in the X direction. Each bracket has a threaded hole, reducing the number of nuts needed, simplifying assembly.

M3 Threaded ACME Nuts

Each ACME nut  now has threaded holes to mount ACME nuts, eliminating the need to use small and finicky M3 nuts.

Reinforced ACME Nut Holders

3D printed ACME nut holders have been redesigned to be stronger and identical on all axis, allowing the Mill One to be more precise and easier to assemble.

Arduino Uno

An improvement that Mac users will appreciate, newer Mill Ones will come with higher quality Arduino Unos that allow for better port detection through UGS.

Reinforced Router Mount with Bushing

Newer Mill Ones will come with a router mount which will work with both the Makita and Ridgid compact routers. Simply slide the bushing included with the mount to use with the Ridgid router, or remove it if you want to use a Makita.

One piece DC cable

We’ve combined the DC power terminal and wires into one screw on piece, making the electronics assembly even more straightforward.

What Kickstarter lets you do is take an idea, a prototype, a brand new product built by people you’ve never heard about and turn it into either a burning failure or a fledgling of a company. We turned to Kickstarter to help mass produce our first batch of Sienci Mill Ones because we didn’t have the money or support to do it ourselves. Thanks to the amazing support of the friends, family, industry partners, institutions, and most importantly every single backer, we made this project into a reality.

We’re proud to have jumped over all the hurdles to build over eighty desktop CNC machines through our Kickstarter campaign and continue our company’s legacy in building a future of liberating automated manufacturing. This project helped us build a foundation to continue manufacturing the Mill One and give us the knowledge and skills to grow our company.

While we stuck as close to the schedule initially drawn out at the beginning of the campaign as we could, and actually fulfilled most of our orders early or on time, there were a lot of challenges, many late nights, and plenty of setbacks on the way. With everything we faced we used it as an opportunity to improve the Mill One and our company as a whole. The design and manufacturing processes we used for the first machine we shipped to the last machine has changed dramatically. Our backers were fundamental in making improvements, providing us with the support and feedback we needed to make changes, as well as the motivation to keep pushing forward.

We’d like to thank everyone for being with us every step of the way. We accomplished so much more than we could have ever dreamed of in the last eight months. A special shoutout and thank you to local businesses, Jeremy from Inksmith, Andrew from Netherton Solutions, the team at Structur3d, Adam from Boko, John from Nithside Weldfab, the team and engineers at JGW Machine, just to name just a few. Thank you to local makerspaces Kwartzlab, MyShop Makerspace, WATiMake Lab and KW Woodworking & Craft Centre, as well as the University of Waterloo, the Conrad Centre for Business, Entrepreneurship, and Technology, Accelerator Centre, and the Waterloo Region Small Business Centre. There’s so many people to thank, so if we missed you in this list, we want to thank you as well.

The Future of Sienci Labs

We’ve officially sold over 100 Mill Ones and will continue to offer kits on our website at https://sienci.com/product/sienci-mill-one-kit/. You can also find parts on our online store at https://sienci.com/shop/ and we will continue to expand our store with more parts and other items. Our resources page at https://sienci.com/resources/ continues to grow as we add additional resources, and our Facebook user group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/166433110494695/ also continues to grow with more users.

We also have another 100 units ready to be packed, and we are working on updating packaging and assembly instructions for the new updated version. Design files and other open source documentation has been publicly available for a while now, but we recently put together an Instructable (http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Build-the-Sienci-Mill-One-Desktop-CNC/) if you want to build one from scratch.

We’re so excited to see what new opportunities may come in time. Some goals we want to accomplish over the next year is to bring new people on the team, mature the Mill One ecosystem, complete a bigger desktop CNC machine, expand our resources, and get the Mill One into as many hands as possible!

Kickstarter Experience Survey

We want to hear how we did and how we can improve! If you’re received your Mill One and have put it together, please take this survey.

Link to survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeetGNWRb9My9DiBpP6-h7jMBjhsgh5bKKfp7QVeSR0GphEFA/viewform

Keep creating!

-The Sienci Labs Team

 

 

https://www.facebook.com/jamesarmstrong3/videos/10154827736616743/

We made the design for the Mill One open source so you could build it from scratch. It’s been exciting to see the slow emergence of our designs used to build more desktop CNC machines. James from our Facebook user group just posted some videos of his Mill One in action, one of the first machines I have seen fully built.

It’s exciting to see that people are starting to build their own Mill Ones because they bring new innovation and ideas to the table, upgraded designs for the community, and a chance to see what direction we should take for our future designs.

Our company vision has always been to make automated manufacturing technologies more accessible and it’s exciting to see that we are starting to make a difference in the open source community.

 

The last few routers are in for the last of the Kickstarter orders and are packed and ready to go. It was a bit disappointing on how late these routers arrived (2-3 months later than our projected arrival date), but our backers were super patient and we really appreciate how amazing they were.

If you’re one of these backers, you may need an adapter that will convert the plug type of the router (UK) to your country’s outlet type. While we were able to source routers that were for the correct voltage and frequency, we were not able to find a supplier that would be able to ship it overseas to us in Canada with all the plug types we wanted.

If you have any questions or need help getting the right adapter, feel free to reach out.