Chris and I are back from vacation and are resuming our normal schedules. Here’s a nice view of Mt Rainier in Washington.
If you placed an order from Aug 9 to Aug 16, your order will be shipped out today. All shipments for Aug 3 to Aug 8 has already been shipped out by our friend Adil.
Orders going on forward will be shipped out typically within one or two days. If you have any questions, feel free to send us an email at hi@sienci.com!
I (Andy) usually try to blog at least two times a week, but things have been pretty busy since sales for the Mill One have picked up a fair amount over the last two or three weeks, so I haven’t had a chance to blog.
So here’s a bunch of stuff that has happened over the last few weeks (in no particular chronological order).
I put together another video to showcase a project you can do with the Mill One. I found a 3D model of the iPhone 6 case online, which I modified a bit and cut in half, so I could made the bottom from poplar and the top from oak. The whole milling process took about one and a half hours using a 2mm bit.
The phone case came out really well, and looks pretty stylish. My friend Lily let me borrow her phone to model in this video since I had a thick screen protector on my phone that got in the way, so thank you to her!
So we sent Tom Salanderer a Mill One to test out and review. You might have watched the livestream unboxing where he went and put everything together, but had some issues with sending the gcode (he was using incompatible software – not the machine’s fault).
On the next day, the video was set to private. Here’s why:
If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, here’s what happened. The first part of the assembly went fairly smoothly. However near the end, with all the software, Tom got aggravated with all the unhelpful comments on the livestream chat, especially since it was past midnight in Germany. So he decided to end the livestream and put out a video later about the Mill One in more detail.
The livestream is back online and you can check it out here:
New t shirts. We have 14 of them (someone bought one from us already) in small, medium, and large. What should we do with them? Should we sell them on the store? Should we do a giveaway? Let us know via email or through social media!
I will be heading out to see family in BC this week and returning to Ontario on the 15th. Chris will be out for a few days starting on the 10th. We have someone else taking care of fulfillment and so orders placed between the 3rd and the 15th will be shipped within a week. If you have an urgent order, send us a message and we can arrange something.
It’s been pretty busy at Sienci Labs, and we haven’t had a chance to make any new videos for a while. It’s been about a month since our last “What’s on the Mill” upload. Well don’t worry, because we will have some new videos up in the next couple weeks.
If you follow our Facebook page, you might have seen some photos of Terence from Soul Media Lab filming a new video. That’s because we’re working on a new commercial for the Mill One!
If you don’t recognize the name, Terence shot our Kickstarter video last year, and since then, he has been growing his video production company very quickly. The plan is to have a new video out near the end of the month or beginning of August.
We are also working with another video company in Waterloo (details to come out soon) to help us make some more videos on milling projects. We hope that these new videos will help inspire users to try different projects with the Mill One and show them how easy it is to get started.
Make sure to follow our Youtube channel for the latest video content. We’re almost at 500 subscribers!
This is the biggest high school I have ever seen.
Over the last few weeks, we had the chance to talk with a couple teachers about some of the struggles they face when using a CNC machine in the classroom. While teachers want to teach CNC milling in the classroom, the options they had for classroom appropriate machines were all either too expensive, difficult to use, or not robust enough. Many schools actually already had a CNC machine in the tech classrooms, but all of them were not used for years due to the fact that teachers didn’t know how to use them, thus was not able to teach students how to use it. Or, because of the high cost of the machine and the budget constraints, machines would sit broken and unused for long periods of time without someone to repair them.
What makes the Mill One different is the fact that it was designed for beginners. We know that learning the techniques to go from idea to milling a part can be daunting to learn. There’s little room for mistakes, because running your crashing your CNC can be costly. That’s why we built the machine to be easy to use and easy to fix, and that’s why 70% of our users first learn CNC milling on the Mill One.
We’ve already dropped of a bunch of CNC machines to the schools in our area and now have plans to put over a dozen Mill Ones in schools across Ontario for the coming school year. Our teachers are planning on using their machines for projects like making custom circuits, passive phone amplifiers, and wooden gumball machines. It feel really great to know that folks are also seeing the Mill One as an educational tool, and that we are making CNC milling technology accessible for students as well. Some of the teachers have taken their Mill Ones home for the summer to try different things, and we’re really looking forward to seeing how things go when the students go back to school!
The XZ gantry on the Mill One is one of its core parts and thus requires a high level of rigidity to have an overall high level of performance and precision. This blog post will give a quick look into some of the engineering that goes into the Mill One.
Appropriate material selection for the Mill Ones XZ gantry is essential. Initial prototypes were made from 1/4″ PVC, but as the design and performance of the Mill One improved, we found a need for a stronger material to replace the PVC.
A balance of cost and performance determined the material we’d use for the new XZ gantry.
To test for the maximum deflection of the gantry, everything was held steady around the aluminum rails, and a force was applied to the end of the Z axis rail. The red areas have the largest amount of deflection, and we can get an idea of the amount of deflection by taking a look at the legend on the right.
Each material was tested using FEA (finite element analysis) to give us a total max deflection (max deflection occurs at the red areas). Here are some examples:
You can see that the maximum deflection occurs at the bottom of the gantry. If we were to make changes to the design, we know that stiffening up at that area would be the best place to start. Now that we have our results, we could choose the best material.
There are many factors that go into choosing the right material for different parts of a well engineered machine, but this article gives a basic look at how we help make these engineering choices. Every aspect of the Mill One goes through rigorous scrutiny to make it the best machine possible with the constraints we face.
Maker Festival: Maker Extravaganza is happening again this weekend from July 8th to 9th! If you’re in the area and love making, this is an event you don’t want to miss! Last year was a blast, and this year is going to be a blast as well!
Maker Festival aims to bring together a community of makers, hobbyists, technologists, and craftspeople to celebrate technology, creativity, and DIY. The Maker Extravaganza is a huge gathering of folks to share and learn new ideas and technologies happening over the weekend, a part of dozens of other smaller events throughout the summer.
Last years Maker Festival was a unique and exciting experience for us. At that time, we had built our seventh or eighth prototype and were demoing the Mill One. Through Maker Festival, we met many of our beta testers and people who would eventually go on to support our Kickstarter. You can see in the photo below that the prototype Mill One looked a bit different than it does today.
Looking back, it is so amazing to see the progress Sienci Labs has made in the past year. This year at Maker Extravaganza, we will have the latest Mill One V2s (a final product!) and lots of cool samples again, but stay tuned in case we bring anything else special.
There were a few zany new materials we tried cutting for the first time. One was leather.
And the other one was banana!
If you plan on heading out to the Extravaganza, make sure to come by our booth and say hi. We will be on the second floor of the Toronto Reference Library.
For details about the event, visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/maker-extravaganza-2017-tickets-33446484335
We just recently sent out two of our Mill Ones for review, one to Tom Salanderer in Germany, and one to Make Magazine for the 2017 Digital Fabrication Shootout!
Who is Tom? Well those folks who are active in the 3D printing community would know him as a Youtuber covering all sorts of things related to 3D printing. He does product reviews, interviews, filament test, and more. So why CNC milling? Well CNC milling has before now, been an expensive and difficult hobby. Now with the Mill One, desktop CNC milling can be as accessible as 3D printing is today. Partnering with Tom was an awesome opportunity as we are opening up a new channel for rapid prototyping tools that many 3D printer enthusiasts have been waiting for.
What is the Make Magazine Digital Fabrication Shootout? Every year, Make Magazine gathers some of the best digital fabrication tools like 3D printers, CNC machines, and laser cutters to see which products are the best. In the past, Make Magazine has reviewed desktop CNC machines from Carbide 3D, Inventables, and Shopbot, and we’re excited to be on the playing field with the big boys. The even more exciting part is that we’re up against machines that are anywhere from three to twelve times the price of one Mill One. So how will the Mill One stack up? I guess we’ll see when the shootout comes out in November!
It’s been about six months since we first started shipping our first Mill One desktop CNC machines, and we’ve learned a lot since then. With this new knowledge, we have been able to lower our cost of manufacture while increasing the quality of our products and customer service. The Mill One offers phenomenal value for the power and precision it provides, but at Sienci Labs we are continuing to develop tools that make automated manufacturing accessible to makers.
With this in mind, we have decided to do something unprecedented and lower the price of the Mill One. Starting Monday June 26th, the Mill One kit will be offered at $399USD.
Thanks to our customer and community support, we’ve been able to tackle many challenges and improve many aspects of our company and design. Here are just a few:
We’re super excited to be entering this stage in our company and accomplishing our vision as an industry leader in the desktop manufacturing industry! Join us as we continue to move toward a future of providing more affordable and accessible rapid prototyping tools.
For our friends outside of the US and Canada, we have finally arranged a shipping agreement to offer reduced prices to ship internationally, allowing us to open up sales around the world.
We now offer flat rates for all Mill One desktop CNC kits for DHL Express International (3-5 day shipping):
We have also updated shipping algorithms for smaller packages with Canada Post to work with international shipments.
If you run across any issues, or find a bug in the shipping calculator, please send us an email at hi@sienci.com to sort it out!
With any screw driven mechanical positioning system, there is often some degree of slop or “backlash“, including the one used in the Mill One. To explain further, backlash occurs when there is a gap between the threads of the nut and the lead screw and the nut is allowed to move within the gap which is present. With most people, the level of precision that the Mill One provides is more than enough, but for those who want to push their machine further, or want to need their Mill One extremely high precision work, this is an important topic to discuss.
We tested the backlash on our ACME nuts by attaching a dial indicator to the Mill One’s gantry and running the gantry back and forth. We chose a point to call zero on the dial indicator, and moved the gantry past zero, moved it back, then moved back even more, and then moved it forward again. The gap between the zero and where the needle landed was our backlash. A better explanation can be found here: http://www.cncexpo.com/MeasuringBacklash.aspx
We tested this way for both a brand new stock ACME nut, as well as after running for many cycles. We ran the gantry back and forth for about 8 hours, with an additional load simulated by using bungee cords as to wear the nut as far as possible.
The results of this test, are as follows:
Based on these results, we can see that the backlash of the ACME nut had gone from just under 0.001″ to around 0.003″. Just to put that into perspective, 0.003″ is approximately the thickness of a sheet of paper. For most projects, this is a great level of precision. But for something like PCB milling, where the width of each trace can be less than 0.006″, 0.003″ is a big number.
Over the last few months we have been testing anti-backlash nuts on the Mill One, which “preloads” two sides of the ACME nut to eliminate the gap which causes backlash. Using the same tests, the anti backlash nuts manage decrease backlash to less than 0.001″, greatly improving its accuracy. This resulted in parts coming out with much better dimensional accuracy, with tolerances of +/-0.002″ (0.05mm) or better being easily achievable.
Here’s an example of a test cut we milled from some brass:
Because of these good results and since the upgrade is simple to do and fairly inexpensive, we have created kits to allow users to install their own anti backlash nuts. You can order a kit here: https://sienci-upgrade.cospark.io/product/anti-backlash-nut-kit/. We’re really happy to make this upgrade available to let users take their projects to the next level. We will continue to do tests with the anti backlash nuts with a variety of projects, so make sure to check out the blog to find out more!
