* For the rough cutting you need to select from the tool bar “3D” > “Adaptive Clearing”
* Here are some configurations for the actuall milling and the the roughness/passes of the clearing.
We need to configure and specify the tools we will be using.
After configuring the tool we can see some preview passes:
For the fine cutting we select from “3D” > “Contour” and here are some parameters:
To simulate the whole process, we need to specify the tool head of the mill to find out whether there are collisions with the stock.
After successfully simulating (no red signs) we can go to “Postprocess” to export g-code for the Mill.
Both designes were generated with OpenSCAD
And initially I hoped to be able to make carved pockets like this:
But it turned out that I only had a 6mm flat end upcut mill availabe:
But after a while I realized that I kinda missed the assignment to show my understanding of the topic of milling, so I prototyped a stool for the standing working station, hence everyone is using the back of a chair to sit on.
using fixings, testing joints, adjusting feeds and speeds, depth of cut etc)
I tried two different setups:
In Estlcam I configured the thickness of the pocket and hence I was using two plates which will be glued afterwards, I could save time by cutting out only one board:
For other parts the full depth was selected. Estlcam distinguishes between cutout and drilling and so for the four corner holes to drilling:
Here is a detailed view of the milling tool config:
A detailed view of the universal gcode sender, which takes the .nc-files generated by Estlcam and sends it to the final cnc-mill:
Don’t forget to put a sacrificial layer of scrapwood into your mill. After milling too deeply, I ended up using double sacrifical layers.
After everything was loaded the machine’s zero position is required to be set. This is done on the one hand in the file by estlcam and then in the physical world.
Z-Axis calibration
This is how the path looks, before something can go wrong. Afterwards, this function turned out to be more useful than you originally think:
Neil suggested wood screws but since our bed is made out of aluminum, there have been an invention in our lab to hold it down with 3d printed parts, which are actually quite useful. Be careful not to suck them in when you are vacuuming the workspace.
Be sure to be in near of the emergency button:
For the basic design I used the ones by Brian with an ATtiny45
Img. 10 shows the configuration we used at the fabmodules, which turned out to be quite usable, hence Bantam-Tool-Software does not work with png formats.
Img. 11 shows a screeshot from Bantam Tools to which we imported the generated gcode.
Img. 12 shows the milled pcb. For the final soldering we used the upper one which as a offset factor of 13. I could have made less but in the end, it helped out quite a bit, because I had to replace some components and they would not fit in size.
Img. 14 shows some components we had around in our fablab. But the Zener-Diode was missing, so I used the ones from Img. 22 which should work just fine.
For those all the capacitor metrics are not familiar with here is a small help:
After soldering the components in place, also the solder-bridge based jumper for programming the programmer, and the right orientation fo the programming head, I could finally try to program it. Well, As you can see on image 18, with mac I ran into compiling error, which with the help of my friendly instructor we could resolve it (Img. 19).
Well, as to the part “then optionally trying other processes” was quite difficult because we did not have the copper-vinyl paper. So it has to be executed in another time.
