Category: General News

We’re excited to be accepted into the Summer Company Program through the Waterloo Region Small Business Centre where we’ll have access to mentors, connections, events, and $3000 in funding.

Here’s a picture of Rob and me when I went in to sign my program contracts and agreements at the Centre, after my meeting with Inksmith at the Communitech Hub.

Today is also the conclusion of Ignition Week for the Enterprise Co-op Program, a one week intensive workshop/one-on-one mentoring/seminar/tour/crash-course to kick off the upcoming summer. It’s been a great week on learning about everything from sales to marketing, UX and UI design, accounting, legal, and more!

We’ve had some inquiries on building linear motion systems for 3D printers, and so we’ve shrunk down the rails for our CNC machines to use in 3D printers!

These rails are designed to fit into 3D printing machines and be superior to currently available alternatives in strength, stiffness, accuracy, and durability.

Chris and I are working on developing a 3D printer with these rails. Make sure to stay tuned for more details!

We’ve put together a number of rail and gantry prototypes during the past week or so. A bunch have parts have come in for testing, and we’re excited to try them out!

We’ve had interest from a few different places to develop some linear rails for 3D printing applications, so we have created a few designs to address that. This means creating smaller and lighter versions of our current rails and exploring different setups, from belt drives to lead screw drives, angle style rails or flat bar style rails.

We won $5000 from yesterday’s pitch competition! 18 teams presented their pitch to two of our judges, David Rose and Nada Basir, from the Conrad Business, Entrepreneurship, and Technology Center.

Special congratulations to our other pitchers who won an award:

• Aaron Cote, Polyball Studio Monolith
• Ashwin Krishnan, WeSmart Technologies
• Ron Tsang, Thyme
• Richard Norton, Edible Art Project
• Susanna Yu, BeautyTime
• Zain Kevashjee, Soko

This award will be released to us at the conclusion of the Enterprise Co-op Program in August. We’re excited to use these funds to continue developing desktop CNC machines and linear motion systems for rapid prototyping!

It’s been a while since I’ve updated the blog but I have some awesome news! I’ve been accepted into the University of Waterloo’s Enterprise Co-op program!

This means that for the next four months, I will be working on this project full time with the support and mentorship from the University, as well as support from accelerators and incubators in the Kitchener-Waterloo area.

Tim, Chris, and I will be living together and will be working on this machine until we can get it to be perfect. Stay tuned for more details.

So I started fiddling around again with the CNC control board again, and dropped down the acceleration speed of the motors, which stopped the motors from studdering. I haven’t tested out any microstepping yet (I don’t have any jumpers on hand for the control board), but at single step control, we got the x axis to move pretty well.

I noticed however, that there are some issues in stalling in the motor, so we’ll be trying out some different power supply voltages, adjusting current, and just seeing what works best overall.