Adam@SheekGeek

Xcarve and Fusion 360 CAD/CAM

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xcarve2   It has been bout a year now since I last had a chance to play with my CNC machine, so I figured I’d give an update on the progress so far and what I’ve learned.

Hardware:

Firstly, I got the Dewalt 611 router and router mount. This is a huge upgrade from the no-name dremel knock-off I had. After test cutting just once with the old router, the brushes were shot. I sprung for a real tool instead of a toy.  As a bonus, it makes the machine look nicer as well.  In order to fit 1/8″ shank bits, I had to get a 1/8″ collet for the DW611. This wasn’t terribly expensive if you compare the cost to replacing all of my router bits with 1/4″ bits.  I got all of this late summer 2015 and literally had only enough time to attach it all to my machine before life got crazy busy. I never even had a chance to test it until now.

I also recently got the Suck-It from kickstarter. This goes a LONG way into keeping dust to a minimum. A warning, however, I tightened the screw too tightly on my Suck-it and accidentally drove the bottom edge into one of my makerslide rails since I don’t have endstop switches. This  promptly shattered the Suck-it acrylic into incredibly sharp shards.  While you can purchase additional parts from the Suck-it website, I opted to make my own replacements from wood, which is a bit more forgiving.This also gave me a great chance to finally learn some CAD software.

While testing, I finally realized that the ACME screw inventables sent me last year as part of my upgrade kit is warped. It binds in a couple of places when I try to move the Z-axis up all the way.  I thought that I  could fix this by simply getting a stronger motor, so I ordered the NEMA 17 from inventables. This was stronger, but still couldn’t overcome the bend in the screw. The bend also causes the very tip of my bits to wobble ever so slightly. It is almost imperceptible, but makes a big difference when I mill multiple passes of the same shape or try to do PCBs.I contacted Inventables and Mo in customer service worked with me over a couple of weeks to get my Z working great. It turns out that Since I upgraded from Shapeoko1—> Shapeoko2–> Xcarve, I had the wrong spacers on my router mount.  The ones I had were about 2mm too short. Mo helped me get the right length spacers (9.5mm long) and bolts(35mm). My short spacers and bolts were causing the ACME screw to bend back towards the gantry at a significant angle. When installing the new spacers, be sure not to use washers as this will also change the angle of the ACME screw.  With the new spacers installed I can get all but 7mm of my Z axis working perfectly smoothly.  Thanks Mo!

I also bought this clear tube for my suck-it vacuum mount. This was about 63mm in diameter, so I had to same the interior of the acrylic suck-it plate to fit the tube. I also cut it to about 9 or 10 inches in length. At this height, the tube is about the height of the router itself. This gives me more visibility to see what is going on with the business end of my router rather than the black coupling tube that the suck-it came with.

CAD/CAM:

I wanted to learn a real CAD package since my FabAcademy training in 2014.  I only had experience with Sketchup which, while very good for beginners, it doesn’t really follow the same kind of workflow as professional engineering CAD/CAM packages. I wanted to learn something along those lines. I had played with Creo, Solidworks, Antimony, and was looking into Rhino/Grasshopper when I saw Fusion 360. Autodesk has been going crazy buying and building awesome CAD/CAM tools for the hobby market as well as for industry.  Fusion 360 is a complete engineering tool that can start with a 2D sketch or a 3D body and allow a user to create objects, render them realistically, stress test them with finite state analysis, and export 3D print or CNC toolpaths.  Oh, and did I mention that it is free and has a very active community online as well?  So I downloaded it and gave it a try. I am quite pleased with it in all respects!

Having no formal training, I opted to take some free online courses from Udemy.com. Check out my other posts concerning that. Of course, as with anything, beginning is the toughest part. It took me a couple of days to get the hang of the Fusion 360 workflow, but with all the great tutorials and videos online, it is easy to find answers to your questions. If not, you can post to Autodesk’s forum for help.

Moving on, I played with Fusion 360 starting with the 3D sculpt method at first to get some awesome organic shapes, then moved to learning the 2D sketch workflow. I measured my machine and aluminum rails of the Suck-it. I made quite a few mistakes along the way, and had to start over several times, but I finally figured out how to get what I wanted  out of the software. It is still a bit buggy from time to time and crashed a few times when I tried to do certain things, but I think it was partially due to a bad design.  I watched a couple videos and fixed my design and was able to create the toolpaths without further issue.

Fusion 360 can do 2D and 3D milling jobs with ease. There are a lot of options, but videos mentioned in my previous post cover most of what you need to know. I’m running a smoothieBoard on my machine and Fusion 360 has a CAM processor script designed for my board, so I simply select “Smoothie” from the dropdown menu when I go to export my design and I’m good to go.

Sending the job to the machine:

The main software people are using to send jobs to the smoothieboard is Pronterface, which is typically used for 3D printing. It’s all Gcode, so it doesn’t really matter, but for some reason, I didn’t like using a 3D printing software for CNC. Last year I tried using Universal G-code Sender with the smoothie and even played with coding in this ability, but life got too busy for me to continue, so I stuck with using Pronterface. What I like about Pronterface is the ability to create custom buttons. For example, I made buttons to zero the axes, reset the smoothieBoard after I hit the killswitch, etc.  These prevent me from having to manually type the Gcode in the command window. I can even send smoothie console commands using these buttons.

pronterface buttons

You can also run the smoothieboard over ethernet. You can do so through pronterface or by using one of several web interfaces (meaning you can control your 3dprinter or CNC machines over the web). This is useful in my FabLab at work where we have a lot of 3D printers running on a 3D print server. You can run the smoothieboard on this as well. It can host several different web interfaces which I hope to go into later, but one of them is basically a webpage that looks just like pronterface.

I feel like I finally have a good workflow here. You can see my results here. I made replacements of the broken acrylic pieces of my suck-it dust boot that I made in Fusion 360. I used scrap wood, so it had quite a few drill holes going all the way through it already. I also did conventional only, and no climb milling which would have given a nicer finish.  I used a 2-flute straight 1/8″ but as well, no spiral which would have also given me a cleaner result.  Due to my learning curve, I did have to do some manual touch ups to the dimensions of the pocket which explains the nastiness in there you see. suckit

 

 

Using Fusion 360 for CNC and 3D Printing

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Many designers use some kind of computer-aided design or CAD software to make 2D and 3D designs. A common one used by many people is Rhino (especially when used in conjunction with the Grasshopper plugin).  Fusion 360 is a newer, easy to use, free complete CAD/CAM package. If you are going to learn any CAD software for practically any purpose (designing, engineering, fabrication, rendering realistic models, etc) it should be Fusion 360.

Fusion 360 is an Autodesk application that can do many useful things for designers. Whether you want to do something as simple as making cool looking 3D models to stress testing (finite element analysis) and even simulating the simple physics of designs and even milling them out or 3D printing them, Fusion 360 has you covered. It can also render realistic materials and surfaces and make animations of your working mechanical devices. Did I mention that it is free and there are tons of free online video tutorials and classes showing you how to use it with example projects? Oh, and so you aren’t reinventing the wheel (or other simple hardware) you can bring in models directly from McMaster-Carr who carry all sorts of nuts, bolts, gears, chains, etc. which can save you loads of time. This is my brain dump for getting started with Fusion 360 and using it with my CNC machine and my wife’s 3D printer.

Download Fusion 360 for free license. They have yearly licenses for hobbyist and I think even small business, or you can get a 3 year license for education.

Learning to use CAD:

At this point, there are two methodologies to use when creating parts in Fusion 360. If you have CAD experience already, you might be more comfortable drawing 2D parts then extruding them into 3D, etc.  If this is you, then check out this free training class.  The second methodology is sculpting. It begins with simple 3D shapes you can manipulate almost as if it were made of clay.  This is great for 3D smooth shapes. Check out this great free training class for this methodology after taking the first section of this class. These two methodologies don’t replace one another, rather they compliment each other. You will eventually need both for complex designs, but start with whichever one is easiest for you so you can progress quicker. I personally love the “sculpting” mode.

Since on a CNC machine, the Z axis is the one you attach the router to, you will need to change the position of the Z axis in Fusion 360. Then set your preferences such that Z axis is the top axis. Within Fusion 360, click your name at the top right->Preferences. In the main window that pops up, about half way down, there is a “Top Axis” option that is set to Y, change this to Z and then “Apply” Now Z is the top axis like on your CNC machine. This will work for all NEW documents, but if you happen to have an older design or are importing someone else’s design, there’s a couple different ways to change the Z axis.  The simplest method is to select the up-axis when you “setup the job” in Fusion 360. This is done when you are finished with your model design, and want to start creating the toolpaths.

Now, get into making some stuff. While Fusion 360 can do 2D and 3D designs and generate toolpaths for the CNC machine, there are lots of simpler (dumber) 2D workflows out there that are great such as Makercam.com or Easel from Inventables, etc. I’d use Fusion for more complicated 2D and 3D designs. For example, Easel won’t allow you to use a chamfer bit or V bit for engraving last I checked, but Fusion 360 will. This can make some amazing 2D designs.

You will notice that some of the videos tell you to delete certain lines in the generated Gcode from Fusion. This is mostly because it adds a “home” command and many DIY CNC machines don’t have homing switches. This command might tell your machine to go to the maximum extent of your machines to find the switches, but since you have no switches, it’ll end up messing up something.  So many of the tutorials suggest removing the G28 (home) line from the Gcode Fusion 360 generates.  If you have a smoothieboard controller, you should be fine to leave it in as long as you have set up your config files correctly.

How to set your origin to a different are of the design for milling. The best setup is one like the Othermill uses which ensures you never cut into your spoilboard. “Don’t spoil the spoilboard” is a great explanation of this method. I hope to make vids on how to in fusion 360 and real machine.

Can export to Othermill, or Smoothieboard, pocket NC, or other mill. Tons of options in the “Post Processing” menu.

You can simulate the milling process. When you do, the paths have different colors. A post on Autodesk’s forum cleared up what they mean:

  • Yellow: it indicates the rapid move of the toolpath
  • Green: it indicates the lead-in/leadout of the toopath (Lead-in is a cut used to make a smooth transition into the actual cut you want)
  • Red: it indicates the Ramping move of the toolpath
  • Blue: Most part of the toolpath are blue which indicates the cutting.
  • Orange: Is no-engagement stay down linking motion for Adaptive Cleating. Or motion updated when using the Feed Optimization feature.

Here’s my video of an example project I made. It is full of tips on stumbling blocks I came across.

Using LaTeX, Mendeley, and Bibtex in Windows

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Most publications such as a Thesis, Dissertation, conference paper, Journal article, etc. have specific required formatting. We’ve all hit the point where we simply can’t get our word processor to format things the way we want, and we can’t figure out why. The way these apps work is to code in manipulations to raw text. It is kind of like HTML code in Micro$oft Word and LibreOffice formats. In fact if you have a .docx or .odt file, you an open them in an unzipping tool such as 7zip and see all the nitty gritty, including saved images, etc.

LaTeX is basically programming what a document should look like directly. You have to write code to tell the document where to create a subsection, bulleted list, insert images, even to italicize or bold something, but it (usually) gives you much more direct control over formatting.  All through college, I wrote only a few documents in LaTeX because honestly, it was a pain. It is not WYSIWYG editing at all. After you make changes to the code of your document, you have to compile it into a PDF document before you can see what the end result will look like. I avoided using it because I hadn’t found an editor I liked.  Now I have found a workable setup and I’ve solved a few problems for myself that I think might be helpful for others (as well as my future self).

Firstly, you must install an editor, as well as the compiler tools. There are many editors out there and two compilers.

Editor:

I tested several editors (namely Texmaker, TexWorks) but I settled on using TeXstudio.  Texmaker looks nice, but I had trouble getting it to display a recompiled version of my PDF. Texworks has a much more “Linuxy” feel, as it uses two separate windows to display the code and the resulting PDF.  Again, the winner for me was TeXstudio.

Compiler:

There are two LaTeX compiler setups. TexLive and Miktex. I had used Miktex in the past so I tested out TexLive with this installation.

Setup:

Open TeXstudio, then select “Options–>Configure TeXstudio”  then select the “commands” tab.  Here, we must tell TeXstudio where all the compiler programs live. The main thins to fill out are “LaTeX”, “PdfLaTeX”, “External PDF Viewer”, “BibTex”, and “Biber”.  Don’t worry about the other text in the file paths in my screenshot here, That’s automatically entered by TeXstudio when you select the path. Simply click on the file icon on the right hand side for each of these entries and drive to the compiler installation. Here you see that my texlive installation is directly on my C drive. Miktex can be installed the same way. Then wind your way through the fines until you find the “binaries” (which are the actual executable programs) in the “bin” folder.

texstudio

 

Templates:

Now you can start editing and compiling your paper. You can start from scratch, or if the conference or journal you are submitting your paper to has a template you can download, start there.  In my case, IEEE has templates available for download here. Now I recommend you go through a few tutorials  and play with some files like these before using a full-on journal template just to get your bearings with LaTeX. There are commented things in the template that you can add in (uncomment) and multiple ways of doing things you might want to do, so research is king.  Once you’ve written some of the paper and formatting code, compile it by clicking the “compile and View” button in TeXstudio.compile and display  You might need to compile the bibliography separately. For finer grain compiling options, click the “Tools”menu.

References:

You already know I love Mendeley, but you can actually get Mendeley to export a .bib file.  A .bib file is a list of all your references in a format called BibTex, which you can open in any text editor, even in TeXstudio.  The .bib file Mendeley exports is only as good as the data you entered in Mendeley, so make sure it is correct first! You can enter these reference entries directly into your .tex file (the code  you are writing describing your paper) or keep the references in the .bib file and import that file into your paper.   What is great is that you cite something using /cite{nameOfBibtexEntry} and LaTeX and BibTex do all the rest for you. It will enter the citation in the correct format, then it’ll generate your references section of your paper.  The format,  like MLA, APA, etc, is different for each conference, journal, and even discipline in which you are submitting. You can tell your document which format to use using some simple commands, however the template you download likely already sets you up for the correct format.  To get the name you must use in your /cite{} command, open the .bib file and find the entry you want to cite. The first name next to the @article{ tag is the name to use. for example:

In my bibtex file I have the following entry:

@inproceedings{Rao2003,
address = {New York, New York, USA},
author = {Rao, Ananth and Papadimitriou, Christos and Shenker, Scott and Stoica, Ion},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 9th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking – MobiCom ’03},
doi = {10.1145/938985.938996},
isbn = {1581137532},
keywords = {Vehicle,Wireless,ad-hoc,coordinate-based,detection,geographoc,routing,sensornets},
mendeley-tags = {Vehicle,Wireless,detection},
month = {sep},
pages = {96},
publisher = {ACM Press},
title = {{Geographic routing without location information}},
url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=938985.938996},
year = {2003}
}

In my LaTex file, I might have the following line:

Ad hoc wireless sensor networks can be used to track vehicle locations as shown in /cite{Rao2003}.

Once I “compile and view” this document, it will generate a PDF with references automatically generated and in all it’s two-column perfectly formatted glory…. if all goes right.

DIY Caffeine-Free Cherry Cola

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I’m fairly sensitive to caffeine and I love Cherry cola. Being that for some reason soda companies don’t make caffeine-free cherry cola, I decided to make my own. It is very simple and only takes two ingredients.

  1. One can of Caffeine-free soda
  2. About 1/2 teaspoon of Rose-Grenadine cherry syrup. You might need to tweak the measurements to taste. I think this amount tastes exactly like Wild Cherry Pepsi.

You may be tempted to to use the cap of the cherry syrup to measure, and I’ll go ahead and tell that’s a terrible idea. The syrup will dry and make it impossible top open next time. I hope you enjoy!

Capture

 

 

CNC Bottle Opener

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bottleOpener6bottle-Open4A good friend of mine celebrated his birthday recently, and I  wanted to make him somethingon a CNC machine as a gift.  My friend brews beer and is an avid cyclist. In fact, his beer is on tap at the local bike shop.  I Figured the best gift would be a customized bottle opener with a few symbols of his interest engraved into the handle.

First, I ordered the Bottle Opener kit from Inventables.com.  I had seen the project online and assumed this kit included the raw parts I could CNC, but instead, the parts were already milled out.  I just had to engrave them and apply a finish to the wood before screwing the wooden parts onto the steel plate.

My wife is great at graphics so I asked if she would draw up something nice for me.  I wanted each wooden piece of the handle to have an image on both sides so my friend would be able to choose what he wanted the handles to display.  My wife gave me 4 good designs to use: one of just my friends name, the other with the word “Brewmaster”  a third with a bicycle with my friend’s initials embedded in the wheels, and finally a logo of the beer my friend brews for the bike shop.  You can see some of those original images below.

bikeLogoSouthMainIPA

I would need to mill a pocket in some scrap wood exactly the size of the wooden blanks of the bottle opener, stick the blanks into the pocket, and then mill out the designs.  This was much tougher than I realized.

 

The DXF file template from inventables of a the original bottle opener was not the same size as the actual wood blanks, so I had to break out the calipers and scale everything up. Secondly, nothing about the wooden blanks was standard.  Each one was a slightly different size and the holes for the screws were in different places.

The process is fairly simple. Take the SVG files of the designs, then import them in some CAM software which will also ask for the size of the endmill (drill bit thingy) and plan a path in XYZ coordinates to mill out the design in the SVG file.  There’s lots of different software out there. A good (but slightly pricy) one is Vcarve. There are others out there as well including some free and open source tools. A good free one is Makercam.  You can actually download makercam to your computer and use it like a regular program, even though it runs in your browser.  Another very simple CAM software is Easel which is made by the people over at inventables. They have lots of projects you can download directly to Easel as well with full settings.  I recommend you doublecheck feedrates, bit size and all that before actually using the designs though.

When I made the toolpaths for this design I used a 1/64th inch endmill to mill pockets for everything, including the text.   I chose this bit because it was small enough to fit into all of the detailed parts of the designs.  I used a pass depth of 0.1 inches, stepover of 0.0061 (which is about 39%).  For my spindle speed, I set it to 12,000rpm with a feedrate and plunge rate both set at 1 inch/minute.  

I placed a wooden blank in the pocket I had previously milled in the scrap board on the machine and began milling the “Brewmaster” design.  It is important to note here that since milling the pocket in the scrap board, I never turned off the CNC machine. This allowed me to keep the same Zero position for my X and Y coordinates between each milling.  If I changed this, then none of the designs would line up correctly with the wooden blanks.    After the first design was milled I realized the design template from inventables was really wrong about where the holes for the screws had been drilled.  So I scaled the design down and tried again.  Luckily I bought 2 of the bottle opener kits, so I had extra parts to use in case of a disaster like this.

bottle-Open2

After about 5 hours of milling, everything was finished. I had to go in and manually clean up the edges of the cuts a little with a razor knife and sand paper. Then I rubbed on a few coats of linseed oil to protect the wood.  Any food-safe finish can be used such as Mineral oil or Olive oil, but I happened to have linseed oil in the garage.  I forgot to take pictures of the final product, but you can see what one of the blanks looks like. I did both sides of each wood blank, each with a different design so he could flip them around.      

bottle-Open5 bottle-Open3
The final result looks great, however I mentioned that I had bought 2 of these bottle opener kits from inventables.  I kept the other one and after opening about 3 bottles, the metal bent. inventables obviously didn’t use a high grade steel for the opener which is a shame. My buddy probably had the same problem but was too polite to mention it to me.  Here’s a shot of mine after I bent the steel back straight. I also didn’t brush mine with oil so it isn’t as nice looking.
bottleOpener6