Our shipment of motors, leadscrews, 3D printer filament, and other items arrived this Saturday and was released from customs last night. We went to a warehouse in Brampton to pick the items up. The weight of our shipment was 377kg (or 830lbs) so the car was riding pretty low as we drove back to Waterloo.
We’re going to be cleaning out the garage to make some room for the new items. We are considering potentially moving out of the garage soon because it is quite cramped with all the inventory we have in there.
Now that we have our 3D printer filament, we are going to start up the 3D printer farm soon. It’ll take a little while to get everything organized and checked, but now we finally have everything in place to start making our batch of 100 Mill Ones.
The two new Cetus printers are set up and ready to run. We now have a total of seven 3D printers as part of the 3D printer farm which produces parts for the Mill One. Our shipment for 120kg of 3D printer filament has just landed in Canada, and we will be picking it up sometime this week. Having these new printers means we can produce more parts every day, and based on our experience with the Cetus printer we use currently, will reduce the amount of downtime we’ve had with the other 3D printers.
The shipment from China had been shipped late by two weeks, but we’re glad to finally be getting the new items this week. According to the paperwork, the total weight of the shipment is over 330kg (720lbs), so we’ll have to make some new space in the garage!
Please note: No money was exchanged this review. We simply provided a review unit to 3D Printer Chat in exchange for an honest review for the Mill One.
3D printers technically ARE CNC machines because they use “Computer Numeric Control” systems, but when it comes to CNC routers we start to see some major differences between the two types of machines.
Almost all consumer facing 3D printers are FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling) 3D printers, laying down layer by layer of molten plastic to create 3D objects. They use a variety of mechanical systems to move a nozzle which extrudes out the molten plastic to build up that object.
CNC routers work in a similar way, except starting with a block of material and removing material using a rotating cutting bit until you’re left with a object.
Before we dive into how the Mill One was converted it’s important to point out some major differences between CNC routers and 3D printers.
The most important is the differences between the mechanical intent of these machines. CNC routers experience huge amounts of force during milling and rely heavily on the stiffness of the mechanical systems to maintain accuracy. This makes them significantly heavier and slower than a 3D printer. 3D printers on the other hand need to move the extruder nozzle quickly, and because they are relatively lighter than a router or spindle, the mechanical systems lighter and are much more nimble.
While there are several 3D printers which can act as a CNC milling machine, due to the different mechanical requirements of each machine, they are either slow at 3D printing or underpowered as a CNC router. It’s up to the customer to choose if they want a machine that can do one thing really well, or a few things so so.
Regardless of this fact, we still went ahead to see what would happen if we turned the Mill One into a 3D printer!
The first step to modding the Mill One into a 3D printer is to find the right electronics. We had a RAMPS 1.4 control board on hand so we chose to use this. The RAMPS 1.4 has all the sockets and pins needed to control all the periphery devices of a 3D printer (like a hot end, extruder, homing switches). You can find newer, more powerful control boards with many more features that the RAMPS, but the RAMPS is fairly easy to find and can be found inexpensively online.
We followed this dossier to help me wire the RAMPS together and wired the 3 motors which power the X, Y, and Z axis, as well as a spare extruder we had lying around from the old, out of commission Tevo Tarantula. It was quite busted, and some hot glue was to put it together.
Next we made a hotend mount on Onshape (https://cad.onshape.com/documents/52436466fea12dac661480ae/w/b7dc1b1b106c004039ce4fb9/e/b29df9762dbf3a03104811ec) to mount the hotend and set that up as well. We printed it out on the 3D printer.
As for the hotend, we bought a E3D Volcano hotend clone online for a few dollars. It works pretty well, although if you do use this hotend, make sure to use the fan included otherwise it will clog.
Last thing to do is upload the firmware to the Arduino Mega in the RAMPS 1.4. We used this tool to configure the firmware, which will help you configure the firmware to match the rest of your hardware. It took a bit of trial and error to select the right settings. You can also change some of the settings through the EEPROM settings in Repetier Host (the gcode sender/slicer) we used, in case you need to fine tune things.
Installing the firmware is as easy as selecting the right port and device on the Arduino IDE, extracting the downloaded firmware ZIP file, and opening the Repetier.ino file. Simply click “upload” and the firmware should install onto the Arduino.
There’s a couple more things we could add, like a part cooling fan, homing switches, heated bed, etc. However, we wanted to keep things simple and just prove that it was possible to turn the Mill One into a 3D printer. All in all, the Mill One did a decent job at printing out this little low poly Pikachu. You can see there is some blobbing, which can be fixed with fiddling with retraction settings, and we can improve the pointiness of the ears by adding a part cooling fan.
In comparison to a regular 3D printer, the Mill One is a little bit slower and a little bit louder, but it can still produce high quality prints because the mechanical systems are more rigid and more precise. It was a really fun modification to make and the total cost in parts, had we purchased everything new would be around $60, making it a pretty inexpensive mod as well.
Assembled units for the Sienci Mill One ordered on Kickstarter are shipping now. Three left our garage today, and the remaining units will be shipped next week!
Finding the right sized boxes was kind of tricky, but we did find a couple that matched the dimensions we needed at Home Depot. That’s why if you ordered a assembled unit, you’re going to get a Home Depot branded cardboard box. Actually, for extra protection, we put another, smaller Home Depot box inside the large one plus some extra padding to make sure everything is packed as securely as possible.
We’re happy to say we’ve had no items damaged through transport yet, and we hope we can keep it that way!
Here’s a quick project done on the Mill One, made from some blocks of cedar that Chris had found at Home Depot.
We had gotten a new 1/4″ 2 flute upcut bit as a gift that I hadn’t tried out yet, and I felt like a box would be a good project to try it out on. With the geometry of this box, most of the work is done carving out the inside of the box, and so a large bit which could remove a lot of material per pass was perfect.
I started off my surface milling a few mm into the wood, getting the thickness of the piece to about 1.375in. I did this because the top of the wood was slightly curved, and I wanted the top of the box to be flat.
In the beginning I had put the feedrate at around 700-800mm/min, but it felt to slow at that rate, so I bumped it up to about 1000mm/min. I think if I had kept the same feedrate, it would have given it a slightly nicer finish, but after some light sanding, the results would be indistinguishable.
One of the quirks about milling solid wood is that it will leave burrs, especially with softer wood like fir or pine. Cedar is a fairly light wood, and so there was a small amount of fuzzing at the edges, but it was easily picked or sanded off. Having a sharp bit certainly helped, and I did vary the router speed between 12,oooRPM to 16,000RPM to experiment, and found somewhere in between worked the best.
I have designed a lid for the box as well, and will be milling one out some other time.
You should be able to download the design and modify it to fit the dimensions you like. This box is designed to be made using router bits 1/4″ and smaller. If you want to use a larger router bit, increase the inner radius of the box to accommodate.
Have project ideas you want us to try out? Feel free to reach out to us!
3D printers, CNC machines, laser cutters, saws, tools galore. Makerspaces are the best place to go when you need access to tools and machines to create your next product. One of the challenges the people who operate makerspaces is that machines offered to their members need to be robust, reliable, easy to use, and affordable.
While easy to use and reliable 3D printers can be found in abundance, and there are a wide selection of laser cutters, there are no clear choice for a CNC router. With CNC routers coming in all shapes and sizes, some costing a few hundred, all the way to hundreds of thousands of dollars, it can be daunting when choosing the right tool.
So where does the Sienci Mill One come into play? Learning to use a CNC machine is a daunting, and with industrial size machines, can be dangerous as well. Users need to understand concepts like feedrate, depth of cut, and different types of passes to have success with a CNC milling machine. The Sienci Mill One offers a easy to learn platform to get users familiar with basic CNC milling concepts that can be used in all types of CNC milling machines. And at the price point it offers, makerspaces can purchase several units for the price of one expensive unit, giving more members access desktop CNC milling technologies.
The Sienci Mill One currently resides in several makerspaces in North America, and we’re looking forward to be putting our machines in more areas where people can mill amazing things!
With Troy’s instructable, you can now add homing switches to your Sienci Mill One!
What are homing switches? Homing switches allow a machine to touch off of each end of the axis to help find the absolute position within the unit. When the Mill One is first turned on, the current location in which it is at is considered the origin (0,0,0). Until the origin is reset, the machine will consider the movement of the axis to be relative to that origin point. By homing the machine, we can reset the machine to call the same physical position of the endmill to be the origin.
While in most cases, homing switches are not necessary, but in some cases, they can be useful. In a case where you want to make the same part over and over again, it is possible to make a jig to clamp the material in the same position on the bed. By homing the machine, you can set up the Mill One to start milling in the same location of the material every time. This is just one example.
To find out how you can add this feature to your Mill One, visit: https://www.instructables.com/id/Add-Homing-Switches-to-a-Sienci-Mill-One-CNC/
