Desktop CNC From Hardware Parts Really Makes The Cut

July 22, 2015 by Kevin Dady 20 Comments

We love shop made CNC mills, so when [joekutz] tipped us off about the desktop sized CNC he just completed, we had to take a look. Each axis slides around on ball bearing drawer slides, and the machine itself is constructed with MDF and aluminum. And the results it produces are fantastic.

The machine’s work area weighs in at 160*160mm with a height of 25mm. Its the table is moved around with a pair of NEMA17 motors and M8 stainless steel threaded rods. Motor control is done with a pair of Arduino’s but they also do double duty with one processing G-code while the other handles the keypad and LCD interface.

The business end is a Proxxon rotary tool whizzing up to 2000RPM, and while [joekutz] hasn’t tried it on soft metals like brass or aluminum, he has successfully cut and engraved wood, plastics and copper clad PCB material.

Be sure to join us after the break for some YouTube videos. [joe] has posted three of a planned five-part-series which aren’t linked to in the project page shown above. to see this machine in action and get a rundown how it all works

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Coin-Op Weather

July 8, 2015 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

When you have access to your own CNC machine, you tend to make stuff first and ask questions later. That sounds like how [Rui Cabral] came up with a weather station stuffed into a miniature arcade game cabinet.

Standing only about 16 cm tall, the cabinet is quite detailed and resembles the familiar arcade form factor that has consumed countless quarters. It even appears to be made of particle board like the big boys. The screen cutout is filled by a 84×48 monochrome Nokia display, and the rest of the cabinet’s interior is stuffed with a CNC-milled PCB, temperature and humidity sensors, an RTC, and a Bluetooth module for uploading data to a phone. [Rui] even manages to work in an homage to the grand-daddy of all arcade games with a Pong splash screen.

Another good-looking display for this project might have been this ePaper badge made into a weather station. And we’ve featured even tinier arcade cabinets too, though perhaps not as functional.

[Rui] takes us on a video tour of his build after the break.

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On-Demand Paper Clips

July 7, 2015 by Rich Bremer 19 Comments

3D Printers are great for printing out parts or items you need, but can they really help if you run out of paper clips? Yes, the all important and extremely overlooked bent metal fastener can put a serious damper on your day if not readily available. There is a solution to this problem, it’s called the Paper Clip Maximizer 1.0. The only consequence of using such a machine may be the destruction of mankind.

The machine takes a spool of wire and methodically bends it into a paper clip shape. Just like an extruder on a 3D Printer, there is a knurled drive wheel with a spring-loaded bearing pinching the wire. This drive wheel is powered by an RC servo that has been modified for continuous rotation. After the drive mechanism, the wire passes through a sturdy guide block. Upon exit, the wire finds the bending head, also powered by a servo. There is a bearing on the end of the bending head that is used to bend the wire around the guide block. After making several bends to form the paper clip, the bending head swings around to cut off the newly manufactured clip with an abrasive wheel. Unfortunately, this part of the process doesn’t work well. The cutoff wheel motor is powered directly by the Arduino that controls the entire machine, the power output of which is not enough to easily cut the wire. It can also leave a sharp burr on the cut wire which is not a great feature for paper clips to have. But we just see these as future fodder for hacking sessions!

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Rotary Indexer Gives Mill A 4th Axis (sort Of)

July 4, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 23 Comments

Rotary indexer’s are standard issue in most machine shops. These allow you to hold or chuck a work piece, and then a graduated handle lets you to rotate the workpiece. Useful when you want to drill or tap axial or radial features. A rack and pinion drive ensures that the workpiece does not move under machining load. Quite often, these indexers also have a manual lock to take care of gear backlash and play. Automating them is not too difficult either. You could use just a stepper motor (open loop) or servo+encoder (closed loop) to drive the turntable.

[smashedagainst] needed to drill six radial holes on a part. And he had to do it on 500 pieces for a total of 3000 holes. That was just for the first initial run, with more drilling likely in the future. The part in question was small and light weight. So instead of using a heavy duty, industrial grade unit, he built an all-electric rotary indexing jig using a stepper motor and an Arduino, giving him a sort of rotary 4th axis. His idea was to directly use the stepper motor to rotate the workpiece without any gearing, but he needed to build his own rig to do so.

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Hope It’s Real: 3D Printing Houses With Bricks

June 29, 2015 by Mike Szczys 123 Comments

You’ve just got to go with the hype on this one, because it’s obviously not ready for prime time yet. But a few days ago murmurs started circling the net that an Australian inventor had developed a robot capable of building complicated structure from brick all by itself.

Before you go off your rocker… we’re definitely not calling this real. It’s a proof of concept at best, but that doesn’t prevent us from getting excited. How long have you been waiting for robots that can build entire structures on our behalf? We were excited at the prospect of extruding walls of concrete. But this is more like LEGO buildings in the real world. The beast cuts brick to length, conveys each brick along the telescoping arm, and butters them as it lays them in place. At least that’s what the rendered video after the break shows.

We’re hearing about this now because FastBrick Robotics, the company [Mark Pivac] founded and has spent ten years developing the Hadrian project at, was just sold to a company called DMY Capital Limited. Of course they’re going to want to get some press out of the sale.

There is an image of the brick feeder on an existing excavator that frankly looks photoshopped. And some real images like the one seen here and another of the “print head” holding some bricks. But it’s enough to think there’s potential here.

The idea is that the base of the robot is fixed with the arm long enough to reach any part of the structure being built. Precise positioning is achieved by a fixed marker in a different position from the robot. The head triangulates its position using laser range-finding with the marker (having said that we now assume there needs to be more than one marker).

So what do you think? Are we ever going to see this incredibly complicated bucket of awesome producing structures in our neighborhood which the Big Bad Wolf simply cannot blow down?

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DIY MDF CNC Machine Is Small And Solid

June 7, 2015 by Rich Bremer 21 Comments

In the world of hobby-level CNC cost and simplicity are usually the name of the game. Using inexpensive and easily found materials makes a big difference in the feasibility of a project. [FreeRider] had built a CNC router before but it was big, flexible and not as accurate as he wanted. He set off to design his own table top router, influenced from other designs found on the ‘net, but also keeping the costs down and ease of build up.

The machine frame is made from 3/4″ MDF and was cut on [FreeRider’s] first router, the JGRO. Notice how all the holes are counterbored for the many bolt heads. It is clear that much attention to detail went into the design of this machine. Aluminum angle act as linear rails on which v-wheel bearings travel. Skate bearings support 5/16″ threaded rod used as lead screws. Lead nuts are tapped HDPE blocks and seem to be doing a satisfactory job with minimal backlash.

[FreeRider] says his new machine is capable of 60 inches per minute travel, double that of his old machine. Since the new machine is stiffer, he’s able to route aluminum and has successfully made some brackets out of 1/8″ plate. He reports the dimensional accurate to be about 0.002-0.003 inches. For more inexpensive MDF-based CNC machines, check out this drawer slide bearing one or this one that uses a drill for a spindle.

Otherworldy CAD Software Hails From A Parallel Universe

May 29, 2015 by Sonya Vasquez 124 Comments

The world of free 3D-modeling software tends to be grim when compared to the expensive professional packages. Furthermore, 3D CAD modeling software suggestions seem to throw an uproar when new users seek open-source or inexpensive alternatives. Taking a step apart from the rest, [Matt] has developed his own open-source CAD package with a spin that inverts the typical way we do CAD.

Antimony is a fresh perspective on 3D modeling. In contrast to Blender’s “free-form sculpting” and Solidworks’ sequential extrudes and cuts, Antimony invites you to break down your model into a network of both primitive geometry and operations that interact with that geometry.

Functionally, Antimony represents objects as a graphical collection of nodes that encode both primitives and operations. Want a cylinder? Start with a circle node and pipe it into an extrude node. Need to cut out some part geometry? Try defining it with one or more primitives, and then perform a boolean intersection operation. Users can even write their own nodes with custom scripts written in Python. Overall, Antimony boasts the power of parametric design similar to OpenSCAD while it also boosts readability with a graphical, rather than text-based, part description. Finally, because part geometry is essentially stored as a series of instructions, the process of modeling the part does not limit the resolution of the output .STL mesh. (Think: vector-based images, versus pixel-based images).

Current versions of the software are available for both Mac and Linux, and the entire project is open-source and available on the Githubs. (For the shrewd-eyed software developers, most of the project is written with Python that interacts with lower-level routines handled in C++ and exposed through Boost.Python.) Take a video tour of an Antimony workflow with [Matt] after the break. All-in-all, despite that the software is still in its alpha stages, it’s highly functional and (for the block-diagram fans) intuitive. We’re thrilled to put our programming hats on and try CAD from, as [Matt] coins it “a parallel universe.”

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