We’ve been working hard for the last few weeks to iterate and design our desktop CNC machine design and here’s a rendered CAD image of where we are right now.
Before putting in the electronics, we have just over 160 parts. Compared to other desktop CNC milling machines, this is an incredibly low number (about 280-300 on the Shapeoko BOM and X Carve BOM) but we’re still working on finding ways to do more with less parts, simplifying assembly, and making repairs easy.
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:
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.
Our 3D printer is up and running and has been printing furiously for the last 2 days.
Here’s the setup and a Y axis gantry we got printed:
As well as some test prints:
Our 3D printer has finally arrived here in Waterloo all the way from Guangzhou! It’s a Tevo Tarantula that we picked up for just under $400 CAD.
We’re moving into exam season so the project will be slowing down for a few weeks until we can move into working on it full time, but hopefully the 3D printer will be fully assembled and printing so we can have stuff being made while we study!
I’ve been working on improving stiffness in all of the axis. Here’s a 3D render of the X and Z axis assembly. I found that the biggest issue with the previous iteration was that it was difficult to reach the fasteners, so it was a bit tricky to get everything as tight as possible.
We ordered linear rods and bearings, lead screws and nuts, and some other fun stuff to play around with, so this design is going to implement them. Lets hope they get here soon.
In the meantime, Chris is printing out some new parts for us to test out, and so we should know how they do in the next couple of days.
We’ve entered the 2016 Hackaday Prize!
Our project page is public. Please check it out and like/share our page!
The Hackaday Prize is a competition synonymous with creating for social change. Using your hardware, coding, scientific, design and mechanical abilities, you will make big changes in peoples’ lives.
It’s time to leverage your talent and find solutions to address technology issues facing humanity today. With a new technical design challenge every 5 weeks, you are expanding the frontiers of knowledge and engineering.
Design an impactful project that suits you, or collaborate with someone else to do it. With our global collaboration platform, your project can be moving forward at all hours of the day. Create things like a better radiation monitoring system, a better calorimeter, open source instrumentation, digital logging scales and exercise trackers. Or go beyond that and create something that has never been seen before.
