36 points | by hughgrunt4 hours ago
It's meant to be an alternative to the Desktop CNCs like Nomad, Carvera, Bantam, ... moreso than a PCNC or other proper entry-level CNC.
The ultimate goal is to make it hobbyist-friendly, capable of easily cutting alumin(i)um and not taking up a lot space, not being messy or loud enough to require a dedicated workshop. Unfortunately, cutting metal is inherently loud so you probably would not be able to run it in an apartment as I'd hoped.
I've made a couple decisions around being friendly for people coming from the 3DP space around probing, using roborock CPAP as chipvac, running it mostly dry, fully enclosed. I'm also starting to work on computer-vision-based probing and the idea is to later enable a host of more user-friendly and safety-focused features and maybe integration with Kiri:Moto's CNC mode for "guided" CAM and so on - basically a beginner-friendly CNC that guides newbies using an integrated web-interface.
More info on Github: https://github.com/thingsapart/mini_nc
GH is a little outdated but I've been using the little machine to cut alu for a while (mostly parts for itself) and it's working quite well. There's more videos and such on the Discord linked in the GH readme - feel free to ask questions on the Discord, I try to respond as quickly as I can. The full model with all its components is completely open in Onshape (I know it's not ideal but how I learned CAD - link also on GH).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41467268
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27645605
This was a resource which was mentioned on the Shapeoko wiki --- while it's off-line, it's still on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20211127090321/https://wiki.shap...
Since then, some of those pages have been made available on Reddit:
https://old.reddit.com/r/hobbycnc/wiki/index
https://old.reddit.com/r/shapeoko/wiki (ob. discl., I work for Carbide 3D)
And there have been a number of other developments
- FreeCAD has hugely improved since that was written.
- Solvespace as greatly improved, adding some basic CAM functionality
- Blender has had the Solvespace sketcher ported to it as https://www.cadsketcher.com/ and BlenderCAM has gotten quite a bit more workable
- Dune3D was created and is remarkably capable: https://dune3d.org/
Also a fair number of forums discussing CNC were gathered at: https://forum.makerforums.info/
Maybe not stuff you would want to run professionally but it works quite well in a hobbyist setting and a mistake won't cost you $50.
I also looked into the Millenium Milo, only downside for me and kinda why I decided to design my own Voron V0-ish sized machine was the really large footprint for about 3x the work volume (work _area_ is ~2x afair). An enclosed Milo would take up about the same volume as two 350mm Voron's side-by-side. So footprint of a small desk.
Imo besides the price, the other big factor is just how much less forgiving CNC machining is than 3d printing - so many mistakes you can make, zeroing the WCS, wrong WCS, mounting the work different than you had it in CAM, ... bam, at least the work is ruined. That's kind of another longer-term goal with my CNC machine, reducing some of these errors if possible with a web-based UI and maybe some computer vision. But that's far off, I'm currently playing with using a camera for work-probing/WCS-zeroing and it's sloooow progress :')