Category: General News

Midwest Reprap Festival coming up soon! Hosted in Goshen, Indiana, The MRRF brings thousands of makers around the world to share their reprap (replicating rapid-prototying) projects. We’ll be there to show off the Mill One all the other awesome projects we’re working on, because we love 3D printing too.

This is the first time we are attending MRRF and we are super excited to be there this year. Will we be the only desktop CNC company there? We’ll see!

Want to attend? Admission is free, sign up for a ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2017-midwest-reprap-festival-mrrf2017-aka-mrrf-tickets-28382784673

Read more about previous years on Hackaday: http://hackaday.com/tag/midwest-reprap-festival/

 

Schedule:

FRIDAY March 24, 5pm – 10pm

Setup day and hangout day as in past events, with many people showing up and bringing in all their stuff to show off.  The event hall will open at 5pm and stay open until 10pm for setup for anyone coming to attend.  If you’re just coming to walk through you’re welcome to come friday as well!  Plenty of hang out time and meetups on Friday.  Feel free to wander out and grab food then come back and hang out.

SATURDAY March 25, 10am – 6pm

Doors open by 10am and let the show begin!

SATURDAY March 25, Noon – 6pm

We’ll have speakers and presenters throughout the day starting at noon giving talks on all things 3D printing and/or related.

INTERESTED IN GIVING A PRESENTATION?  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

SATURDAY March 25 7pm-9pm

Dinner for all registered attendees.  Chinese Buffet is where it’s at again, so come hungry!

SUNDAY March 26 10am – 5pm

Doors open by 10am.  There will be FPV Drone racing outdoors weather permitting and a few more presentations this year on Sunday.  Event ends 5pm and load out/cleanup afterwards.

 

 

We believe that a tool designed for everyone should be designed by everyone. The designs of the Mill One are constantly being improved to increase performance and ease of manufacture and assembly. However, keeping up our publicly available design files up to date has been a challenge, especially since we are so busy shipping orders.

This is the reason why we’re changing our designing workflow: to make our latest designs more accessible. This process will most likely take a few weeks, but it will be well worth the work.

While the Sienci Mill One has been completely designed on Solidworks, we are switching over our design systems to Onshape. Why? Well there’s a couple reasons.

1) Powerful, free CAD software on any device

Onshape allows users to access powerful CAD software on any internet connected device, whether it be a phone, tablet, or laptop. This means we can give access to our latest designs to the most amount of people. Users can copy and edit our designs through Onshape using either a free, full featured account (with those designs also being publicly available).

2) Version control and access to the latest designs

One of the advantages of running CAD on the cloud is that everything is saved automatically. No lost files. Full records of all the design changes that has happened over time. We will be able to see all the design changes which has happened with the Mill One, and if you are a Mill One owner, you will be able to find your version easily. If you’re curious about the work that we are doing to improve the Mill One, it will be easy to see them on Onshape.

As I mentioned above, updating our design files on Thingiverse and Github is often inconsistent and it can take several weeks. Every design file on Onshape will be the latest and can be downloaded in a wide variety of file formats (STL, DXF, IGES….).

Conclusion

I am really excited to explore all the new opportunities by opening up our designs on Onshape. It’ll be a bit of getting used to, but we are trying out all the new features and it’s been working great!

Not everything has been uploaded to Onshape yet, but you can check out the Sienci Mill One design document at https://cad.onshape.com/documents/f129a1cb4c9e4b8ba7c141fa/w/62929c10eab89bef61547fe5/e/cb2f6605819782348b72c551

Please note that Solidworks imports may not be editable, and we will be working on redrawing models so that they can be edited easily on Onshape.

Let us know what you think of this new system, and if you have any feedback, feel free to reach out to us on social media or through email!

 

 

 

 

New parts are in! We are working hard to start putting together a new batch of 120 units. We spent all day driving around picking up parts and visiting our manufacturers. New gantries, power supplies, cables, frames, rails, and fasteners are here ready to get kitted.

It was pretty interesting to have Chris drive in the snow with a couple hundred pounds of metal in the back trunk. Hopefully we’ll be able to afford a truck soon.

Sometime next week we plan on dropping them off at the warehouse so that we can have some more space in the garage.

I have gotten word from our router supplier in the UK that the Makita routers which will come with some of the kits will be shipped at the end of this week. We’re putting together the rest of the kits so that we are able to have them ready as soon as possible.

We’re also putting together the assembled Mill Ones from our Kickstarter as well, but we are still sourcing some packaging material to fit the machines in since they are quite large and heavy.

Chris and I attended NBTC 2017 this year with the gang at the Conrad Centre. NBTC (National Business and Technology Conference) held at the Omni Hotel in Toronto. We got to hear lots of cool talks, attend workshops, and of course, meet lots of people.

A special congrats to Siobhan and and Daisy from our Enterprise Co-op cohort for becoming the two finalists for the Newcomers Entrepreneurship Challenge. Daisy was the one took home the $1000 prize at NBTC for her pitch for her rendering company Pxls.

Find out more about the conference at http://nbtc.nspire.org!

With survey data collected from our Kickstarter backers, we can now paint a picture on what type of people have purchased a Sienci Mill One. We asked every single backer (almost 90 people) to tell us what they do, and we compiled the data into groups for each industry. Here’s a pie chart that describes our user base:

As you can see, most users are in engineering, followed by software and art and design. It’s pretty amazing to see the diversity in the people who purchased a Mill One.

Now here’s a pie chart that divides people who are in industries that commonly use CNC technology vs those who do not.

For many of our users, the Mill One is their first foray into CNC milling, and it’s exciting to see that there are so many different types of people trying it out and making cool things. As a kit designed specifically to be simple and easy to use, based on our data, its easy to see that we’re making desktop CNCing more accessible!

Josh from MyShop Makerspace and I made a deal to trade a Sienci Mill One for 100 acrylic panels laser engraved with our logo! Check out the results:

This means that the next batch of 100 units will have our logo on the front panel!

 

 

On Thursday, we drove over to Toronto to the Mars Discovery District to attend a talk called The Future of Making Things: AI in Design and Manufacturing by Mike Haley, Senior Director, Machine Intelligence at Autodesk. It was exciting to hear about the new developments Autodesk in implementing artificial intelligence in design and manufacture and how these new developments will empower makers and engineer to create faster and better than ever before.

So what’s the first thing to get excited about? Well it’s something I call “conversational design”. With this new concept, a computer can take millions of different designs, interpret them, and figure out what how the object is designed to function as that part. Then the user can simply state the item they want to create, for example a vase, and the computer will generate a myriad vases. By talking with the computer, the user can describe the vase that they want or show it sketches or pictures, and the computer will continually generate designs that fit the description. The user can also choose between different variations of the design and select the one which fits what they have in mind.

While this is still under development at Autodesk, it’s extremely exciting to imagine a world where anyone can dream up a design, talk to a computer, and have the 3D digital design for that part without the user needing to know any knowledge about using traditional CAD.

Next thing to get excited about is intelligent CAM. Designing something is typically the first step in building a new product, but turning that idea into something you can hold in your had is another difficult step. CNC machining is a commonly used manufacturing technique, but can also be extremely difficult. With CAM software which can use artificial intelligence to create toolpaths optimized for speed and precision will radically change the field of CNC machining, rendering the need to create complex machining operations a job of the past while simultaneously bringing radical increases to productivity on the manufacturing floor.

Artificial intelligence will certainly change the way we make. It’s exciting to see the develops that are being made and how it will make design and manufacturing easier, and these new developments will bring us closer to a future where individuals can turn an idea and turn it into a physical object faster than ever before.

 

I just went to the bank to pay for parts to start manufacturing a new batch of Sienci Mill Ones! We want to have the inventory available to ship machines out in a few days rather than the three or four weeks so our customers don’t have to wait to get their machines. Over the course of the next month, we’ll be working on ordering and receiving all the parts to put together 120 kits while having the 20 or 30 extra machines we have after all our Kickstarter machines have shipped ready for order right now.

We’ve been in the talks with a couple of Youtubers and news channels as well who will be helping us reach new makers. With the grant money we have received, personal investments, and remaining cash from our Kickstarter campaign, our plan is to expand our company and put low cost, easy to use rapid prototyping systems in the hands of makers around the world.

The feedback from our Kickstarter backers who have already received their machines have helped us design improvements to our current parts, some of which have been slowly implemented as we ship machines, and some which will be implemented when we manufacture parts for our next batch. Stay tuned for new updates!

 

The 3D printers are back running again at full tilt! Our printers have been working on and off over the last few weeks since we ran out of 3D printer filament, but now with a shipment of 30kg of filament, we’re churning out parts as quickly as we can.

While we ordered 50 kg of 3D printer filament from our supplier, they were only able to provide us with 30kg. Not only that, they have told us that they will need to raise their 3D printer filament prices in the future. 30kg of filament is enough to print another 60 machine (just enough to finish producing for our Kickstarter orders), but we will have to find new source for 3D printer filament. At the moment, we’re talking with one of our suppliers who also stock 3D printer filament to see if they would be able to ship us filament at a good price.

In other news, we have been using the Cetus printer Chris recently received in the mail. It’s been doing a great job churning out these frame brackets. We’re expecting another 3D printer to arrive tomorrow, as well as a replacement to the Monoprice Maker Select to come in soon to help us create 3D printed parts faster.

Here’s a couple sets of parts in a box. We have made some changes to the design of some of the components to improve fit and strength as well.

I will get to uploading or updating the parts on our Thingiverse soon so if you have a Sienci Mill One, you can print some updated parts if you want.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working with a fellow we met through our mentor, Don Thompson, from the Accelerator Centre, connected us to in designing new custom packaging and co-packing solutions to help us manage our logistics. Rolando De Leon  has been working in the packaging and logistics business for over 12 years.

Not only will these boxes protect their contents better, but will also be slightly smaller, thus potentially lowering the cost of shipping. All of the items will also be organized in a new layout which will be designed to help with assembly as well.

We currently have a working design for the packaging and are making small adjustments to make the packaging even more secure. Our next step is to complete the ISTA certification, which will test our packaging and prove that our packaging will survive shipment around the world.

The testing will cover drop tests on every axis and corner, vibration tests, and more.

While it will be a few weeks until we roll out the new boxes, we hope it will absolve us from the tedious task of ensuring enough protection and padding is in the box.

Here’s some quick photos of the packaging: