One of the key areas that we strive to improve on in our manufacturing process is with the quality of the 3D prints in the Mill One kits. Our 3D printed part quality is an area that has a lot of room to grow in terms of improving quality. We have worked with our customers and listened to their suggestions to improve print quality, and over the last couple of months, our prints have become stronger, more consistent, and more precise. Making these improvements have involved testing different print settings, nozzle sizes, bed surfaces, and materials.

One other step that we have taken in improving print quality has been to update our printer farm with two new Prusa i3 MK3 printers. This is to increase our print capacity, as well start replacing printers from our aging fleet. One of our longest lasting printers has close to 3000 hours of printing on it.

If you’re familiar with Prusa as a company, they build industry-leading printers known for their consistency and reliability. They are currently being used to print the ACME nut mounts and the angle mounts, which are parts that require good layer adhesion to provide high strength. Based on our initial tests with the ACME nut mounts, it appears that these new mounts are stronger and less prone to cracking than mounts made by other printers. We have one printer that has been working fairly reliably but still need to fix some things on the other Prusa to have it up and running properly.

Here are some other things that we have improved over the last couple months:

• Reduce Z banding on the electronics holder and cover
• Improve bed adhesion for the angle mounts
• Adjust tolerances on the nut catches on the ACME nut mounts
• Switch from using the Cetus printers for printing the ACME nut mounts over to the Wanhao i3 or Prusa printers to have a smoother bottom surface (the raft on the Cetus leaves a rough bottom surface)

 

We’re excited to be using these new printers for creating better parts and continually improving our kit!

Hey guys, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. It’s been really busy at Sienci Labs, sending out machines and working on some new cool things. But we do have some really cool news that I want to share.

We now have Sienci Mill Ones on every continent (minus Antartica)! Although we actually met this milestone a long time ago, we only just realized it when we got orders from Puerto Rico and India this past week. This is a really amazing milestone for us, especially how we’ve seen the diverse number of applications that the Mill One has been used in almost 30 different countries.

If you have any friends in Antartica who might need a small desktop CNC machine, make sure to let them know about us!

 

A couple of users have reported that their Z axis drops during situations such as when the machine stops moving, or when they turn on the router before a cut, which can be really annoying.  While the machine is supposed to have enough resistance from the v wheels and the leadscrew’s resistance to back drive to support a router, some machines may have such low friction in their Z axis that the weight of the router actually exceeds the resistance. You can either rotate the eccentric nuts to allow for more resistance on the Z axis, and/or the rest of this post will talk about another option.

This is where $1= 255 comes in. $1= 255 is a command that you can send to your Mill One that will hold all of your motors to prevent any of the axis from moving when the machine is stationary. This means that if you are experiencing your Z axis moving down, you can use this command to use the motor to hold the axis. Below is a detailed guide on using $1= 255. If you want to learn what $1= 255, and other setting commands mean, check out this page or go to the end of the page.

Step 1) 

Connect your Mill One to your computer and open up Universal Gcode Sender. You can use other gcode senders for this, and the process is the same, but the images below are from Universal Gcode Sender.

If you already have your Mill One connected previously, it is recommended that you open and close the connection.

Step 2)

Give the Mill One a minute to load. You should see the message “Grbl 1.1e [‘$’ for help]” and a string of settings come up in the console.

Step 3)

Into the command box, type in $1= 255.

Press enter. You should see the next entry in the console to say

“>>> $1= 255
ok”

Step 4)

Use the keyboard controls or the onboard jogging controls on Universal Gcode Sender to move one of the axis. You will notice that the motors are now powered on and you cannot move the axis by hand. This will prevent the Z axis from falling when the machine is not in motion.

To turn off motors, follow the same steps, but send the command $1= 25. This will allow the motors to turn off. It is recommended that when you are not using the machine, to unplug the machine from mains power or ensure that the motors are turned off with this command.

 

How does this work? Here is an excerpt from the Grbl 1.1v configuration page:

$1 – Step idle delay, milliseconds

Every time your steppers complete a motion and come to a stop, Grbl will delay disabling the steppers by this value. OR, you can always keep your axes enabled (powered so as to hold position) by setting this value to the maximum 255 milliseconds. Again, just to repeat, you can keep all axes always enabled by setting $1=255.

The stepper idle lock time is the time length Grbl will keep the steppers locked before disabling. Depending on the system, you can set this to zero and disable it. On others, you may need 25-50 milliseconds to make sure your axes come to a complete stop before disabling. This is to help account for machine motors that do not like to be left on for long periods of time without doing something. Also, keep in mind that some stepper drivers don’t remember which micro step they stopped on, so when you re-enable, you may witness some ‘lost’ steps due to this. In this case, just keep your steppers enabled via $1=255.

 

So this past Christmas, the Mill One was featured on Engineering.com, an engineering news source and blog, as one of the Top 10 Gifts for Engineers. Ian from Engineering.com reached out to us to see if we’d be interested in doing an interview and demo for their site, and we said sure! Coincidentally, they had one of their offices in Mississauga, only about a hour drive from our office in Waterloo. So I head down there with a Mill One to talk to the guys and gals at Engineering.com.

For the occasion, I also made some Engineering.com coasters, which we demo live in the video interview posted in the article.

Read the full article here: https://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge/DesignerEdgeArticles/ArticleID/16523/Why-3D-Print-When-You-Can-Mill.aspx

If you’ve been following our work, we do a lot of cool stuff here at Sienci Labs. Thanks to the amazing support from our customers and community, we’ve made great leaps and strides in bringing accessible desktop CNC milling to the people. But this also means having more work to handle than Chris and I can do alone. So we’re looking for people to join our team!

 

Here are a couple things we want to focus on this year:

-Development of new and innovative ways to mesh software and hardware together to make CNC milling a better experience

-Making our supply chain more efficient and continually improving the quality of our kits

-Create high quality digital content for our resources and marketing

 

Are you or someone you know passionate about bringing automated manufacturing technologies to the masses? Then we want to talk to you!

Check out https://sienci-upgrade3.cospark.io/careers/ for the latest job posts. Or if you feel like you might have a fit somewhere else that’s not listed, feel free to email us anyway with a quick intro.

 

Thanks to feedback and community contributions, we have made several changes to the Mill One design that make it better, stronger, and more reliable. Most of these changes are shipping now, and new units come with changelogs that detail changes to assembly that may not be listed in the official V2 assembly manual.

This list will cover the most major changes to the design, all of which can be found on Onshape. Please note that some of the designs may be in progress, partially complete, or have been created to just try out different ideas. We will update our Thingiverse and other open source documentation in the future once designs have been finalized.

Additional mounting points to the Z axis.

Several users have made the mod of adding additional mounting points to the Z axis for the router mount for more flexibility in mounting options or to add other larger, heavier routers to the Mill One. New Mill Ones now come with two additional M8 mounting points on the Z axis rail and a larger, more solid router mount. With the taller mount, users can adjust the router up and down in the mount to allow for more clearance for vices and other work holding apparatus. This change greatly increases the stiffness of the Z axis, allowing the Mill One take more aggressive cuts.

Switch from 200mm lead screws to 150mm lead screws

As some users may have noticed, the 200mm lead screw sticks out slightly from the bottom of the Z axis rail. Although formerly this is not an issue since the router extends further down than the lead screw, with the larger router mount, users can move the position of the router up or down which could cause interference with the lead screw and the workpiece. To prevent this, the 200mm lead screws have been changed to 150mm lead screws. Please note that this does not affect the Z axis travel.

More robust electronics holder

The new electronics holder improves on the older version of the electronics holder in two ways. One, it allows for the use non-screw on type female DC jacks, which are far more common than the screw on type which were used before. This means folks who are building their own Mill Ones can reproduce this component more easily. Second, we have changed from using a friction based clip to hold on the cover of the electronics holder to using a flexible clip based design. This means that no only it is much easier to clip on and off, but makes it much more unlikely that the cover will fall off during transportation. This design change makes it a lot easier to print on a wider variety of 3D printers since the new clip design allows for more variance in print tolerances.

Pre-assembled ACME nut mounts

One of our former suppliers has stopped supplying a specific type of ACME nut which includes an M3 thread in each mounting poin. This means that we are reverting back to a more commonly available version of ACME nut without those threads. Users of the V1 version of the Mill One will know that this is typically the most finicky part of assembling the Mill One due to the fact that the M3 hardware is really small. To fix this in the current version, we will be pre-assembling the ACME nuts with brass nuts included. With the help of a jig and a electric screwdriver, we can produce these parts fairly quickly, so to save folks the trouble of having to put them together themselves, we’ll be doing it for you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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