Category: General News

If you’ve been following our blog over the last few weeks, we’ve been working on manufacturing the final two items for the Sienci Mill One, the XZ gantry and the bed. We had a chance to test them out and made some adjustment to make sure that they fit together nicely (which they did) but we found that the 1/4″ HDPE introduced too much flex in the machine.

So forgoing the whole HDPE thing, we decided to hand mill a set of 1/4″ aluminum gantries which provide a significant increase in rigidity. I am very happy with the results. We’ve made about 18 gantries in one evening, and plan on making more for the kits we’ll be shipping out.

Obviously, we won’t be able to churn out all the gantries ourselves, and so we will explore some different manufacturing processes and materials to make this piece. At least for the time being we will be able to ship our backers another high quality part for their machine.

The folks working on the Grbl project have worked their magic again and have released Grbl 1.1, which comes with a whole new set of features that makes Grbl better than ever before.

For those who don’t know what Grbl is, here’s some information:

Grbl is a no-compromise, high performance, low cost alternative to parallel-port-based motion control for CNC milling. This version of Grbl runs on an Arduino with a 328p processor (Uno, Duemilanove, Nano, Micro, etc).

The controller is written in highly optimized C utilizing every clever feature of the AVR-chips to achieve precise timing and asynchronous operation. It is able to maintain up to 30kHz of stable, jitter free control pulses.

It accepts standards-compliant g-code and has been tested with the output of several CAM tools with no problems. Arcs, circles and helical motion are fully supported, as well as, all other primary g-code commands. Macro functions, variables, and most canned cycles are not supported, but we think GUIs can do a much better job at translating them into straight g-code anyhow.

Grbl includes full acceleration management with look ahead. That means the controller will look up to 16 motions into the future and plan its velocities ahead to deliver smooth acceleration and jerk-free cornering.

• Licensing: Grbl is free software, released under the GPLv3 license.
• For more information and help, check out our Wiki pages! If you find that the information is out-dated, please to help us keep it updated by editing it or notifying our community! Thanks!
• Lead Developer: Sungeun “Sonny” Jeon, Ph.D. (USA) aka @chamnit
• Built on the wonderful Grbl v0.6 (2011) firmware written by Simen Svale Skogsrud (Norway).

I have updated the Resources tab with a new page under the “Software” heading called “Firmware“. You can download Grbl 1.1v with settings for the Sienci Mill One (with 1/8 microstepping) default in the firmware. This means that your machine will be pre-configured when you flash your Arduino Uno with Grbl.

Chris is currently working on some video tutorials which will go over the steps to flash new firmware onto the Arduino, but for the time being, the Grbl wiki page covers instructions on how to upload the firmware to your Arduino.

There has been some delays in receiving the black HDPE material over the holidays which we are making the bed and XZ gantry from, but the material finally arrived at the shop this week. With some critical dimensions involved in the manufacturing of these parts, it required a bit of playing around to get the correct fit and finish for these parts.

Here is us testing out the fit of the v wheels and the rails. While we have managed to get the right tolerances for the fit of the eccentric nuts, we are still working on the correct spacing to allow for the correct amount of preload on the v wheel bearings. We expect to have a set of 10 parts to test at the beginning of next week, which will be checked over to ensure proper fit. If the spacings are correct, they will be packed into kits.

While we are working on this, we have been making sure that once the first set of gantries arrive, we are able to ship kits out by organizing parts into three separate bags. Here’s a recent photo of our garage.

Hey guys, today is our first day of Enterprise Co-op, and Chris and I have been spending the day meeting new people and hearing about many new early stage startups in the area for the E Co-op Launch Week. Our day started off with 5 minute pitches, and Chris won one of the $5000 awards!

The next few days will be filled with workshops and presentations for Chris (it’s mandatory for Chris, while I don’t have to attend because I already have), while I’ll be spending most of my time working throughout the week.

I know that a lot of you guys have been waiting patiently to order the new Sienci Mill One. We wanted to make sure that going forward, we could produce machine kits at a reliable pace. We’ve held off on taking these new orders until we’ve established our supply chain and fully understand what lead times we can expect from our suppliers and manufacturers. Also, we’ve been fiddling around with a variety of e-commerce platforms to set up an efficient method for our customers to order their machines, and are establishing more resources for assembling and using the Sienci Mill One.

Now the time has come…

Within the next week or two, Sienci Labs will be taking new orders for the Sienci Mill One. We will be offering the complete Sienci Mill One Kit (without a router) to our customers in the US and Canada for $499USD (plus shipping).  Those who have signed up for our waiting list will have early access to these kits for one week and will receive a passcode which will allow them access to the ordering page.

At the current moment, we will not be offering routers to go with the Sienci Mill One because we are not able to offer prices that are competitive to what you can find from other retailers until we can purchase over 100 routers at a time.  Routers can be purchased online or at hardware stores (such as Home Depot or Amazon). The Makita RT0701C and Ridgid R24012 will be supported for the Sienci Mill One, but if you have another router or tool you would like to use, please contact us about a custom solution.

The estimated lead time for the second batch of kits will be 6-8 weeks and machine delivery will vary based on shipping location. Kits which were ordered through Kickstarter will be given priority, and newly ordered kits will be shipped in order of which they are placed. We will continue to update our customers about our progress and any delays on our blog and social media pages (Facebook and Twitter) and keep our inventory list updated (inventory).

If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at hi@sienci.com and we’d be happy to help you out!

We are back from the holidays and have gotten right back to work! First thing we did when we got back was set up our garage into an assembly line. We’re starting off by organizing components into sets (one bag for electronics, another for fasteners, for example) so that when the gantries arrive from Boko, we can throw them all into boxes and have them be shipped out!

We just finished packing 60 bags of M8 hardware, 80 power supplies, and 10 bags of wheels, fasteners, plus some other items, and we’ll be working on putting together a whole lot more things in the next few weeks.

Chris has been taking some photos for the assembly manual over the break. Here are some sample pics.

I hope everyone had an awesome holiday. I’ve returned back from BC with a new camera I picked up on Boxing Day.

It’s a new Sony a5000 mirrorless camera we got to take some nice photos and video of the machine, as well as help us make instructional videos for the Sienci Mill One. Tim is also planning to do some fashion design so I’m sure he will be borrowing it too.

Laplace transforms, tensors, bending moments, PLCs oh my!

Chris and I finished our final exams yesterday! Only time will tell if we have passed all of them.

I just landed in BC to spend time with my family and plan to head back to Ontario on the 28th. Chris is back with his family as well. We’re planning on working on things during the break, like updating our assembly instructions and sending lots of emails, so you should be able to get in touch with us if need be.

Happy holidays folks!

AC JumpStart is a matching program that provides eligible companies with

• $30,000 in seed capital*
• $10,000 in mentoring from the AC’s team of in-house experts
• Access to market research and connections to investors

The program is funded through an $8 million commitment from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) and delivered in partnership with Conestoga College, Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo.

Sienci Labs has been accepted into the fifth cohort for the AC Jumpstart program! We received an email a few months ago that we took it as that we were not accepted, but it turns out that we had been applying to the AC Jumpstart program that is only available to University of Waterloo alumni. Thankfully we were considered for the general AC Jumpstart program, and recently we received this email…

I have heard great things about this program from folks in the startup community who have gone through AC Jumpstart, and I am looking forward to starting this January!

We have finally received our eccentric nuts and power supplies, completing our inventory of standardized parts!

You may have noticed that our eccentric nuts look a little longer than standard M5 eccentric nuts you may find sold online. This is because we have asked to manufacture the nuts with a slightly longer bore so that it seats further into the gantries, which helps prevent the v wheel from being pushed at an angle.  Standard eccentric nuts work fine, but we splurged a little bit for a slightly better machine.

Doing this wasn’t without some challenges. Production of these components took 10 days, with additional time for shipping, which is not too bad. However, these nuts were shipped to the wrong place by the shipping forwarder, and thus ended up somewhere in England. So the manufacturer produced another 1000 pieces and sent it over again. We expected to have these in about two weeks, but it turned out to be nearly a month.

The last few things to cover are the frame and the gantries, which are milled locally. We have a set of 20 frames completed, waiting to be dropped off soon. We have ordered some 40mm fans from Aliexpress for some extra cooling, but at this point, am not sure if they will actually arrive on time. They are not necessary for the Sienci Mill One, but a nice option to have. If they come, we will ship them out in each package.

Last few steps that we need to complete is packaging everything up and making sure there are clear instructions in assembling the machine. While there is a instructables page, we are working on creating some exploded views that will make it easier to understand the assembly process.