Sindrian Arts

Well, shoot.

As I mentioned in my latest Kickstarter update I was sick all weekend with a fever. Tuesday I felt tired but mostly fine, but then I started to go downhill again, and woke up this morning feeling worse than before.

*sigh*

I really don’t have time for this.  I’m doing my best to take it easy, but I really hate loosing days.  My hope is that I’ll feel well enough to finish up the $20 Kickstarter rewards tonight and get them in the mail tomorrow, but we’ll see.

I’ve been dissatisfied with how I handled my Kickstarter project for a while.

Several ideas have been kicking around inside my head for a couple weeks, but this morning I got kick in the rear.  Mcphill, one of my larger backers, commented on my project, noting that he had heard nothing for several months.  He had voiced his displeasure with my progress before too, as had another of my backers.  Back then I didn’t know how to handle it, so I did nothing (silly me).  This time, I resolved to fix things.

I immediately posted a comment thanking mcphill for the comment, and promised to write an update right there and then.  Which I did.  In it, I apologized for the lack of contact and progress, outlined what I think I did wrong, and explained how I’d do better from now on.

It felt really good to get it all off my chest.  I’ve felt horrible about this for months, but apparently I needed that kick to get me to finally bite the bullet.  I’m not proud that that’s what got me to finally do something, but I’m glad that I finally have.

One of the things I committed to do is to get all the smaller rewards out the door within the next 30 days.  It’s a pretty scary deadline, but I think I can do it.  I might have to take time off from the day job, but I’ll do it.

Speaking of which, I’m off to work at the Asylum now.  Wish me luck!

My apologies for the long silence; the last month has been a bit of a rollercoaster.

Right after I finished milling out the parts for the next Kikori gantry up at MakeIt Labs, it got shut down.  This meant that instead of getting to work on the kickstarter rewards I had to dismantle my entire operation up there, move everything down to my new space at the Artisan’s Asylum (living up to their name, as always), and build a new gantry first.

If you’ve been following my photostream on Flickr, you’ve watched as I assembled a new Kikori gantry.  While I did find a few minor things that needed tweaking, for the most part it came together beautifully.  This was especially encouraging since the Kikori up at MakeIt was having all sorts of mysterious issues that prevented it from maintaining positional accuracy (given that the new machine has none of these issues, I’m told that it could’ve been caused by a “dirty” power supply in the MakeIt building, which would’ve caused the machine to miss steps).  This showed that even under a worse-case scenario, the Kikori is still capable of self-replication.

In rebuilding the Kikori I also tried out a couple different methods of driving the X axis.  The problem I was having with the original setup of using a single NEMA 23 motor to drive sprockets on both sides of the gantry was that I’d get significant twisting along the drive shafts; enough that the gantry would ‘chatter’ as is moved in that direction.  My first solution was to upgrade to a NEMA 34 motor which uses a 1/2″ drive shaft instead of the 23′s 1/4″.  While this did eliminate the chatter, it also revealed that without the twisting  rod acting like a spring, the motor wasn’t powerful enough.  Finally, I decided to try using two seperate NEMA 23 motors to directly drive the sprockets on either side.  This proved to be by far the best solution: it gave me the best strength, the smoothest motion, and also eliminated the need for drive shafts, bearings, and couplers.

The Kikori is now performing beautifully, maintaining accuracy to within 1/32 of an inch even at feed rates of 100 IPM!  This means that production of the Kickstarter rewards has finally begun.  I’ll be milling out the sets of gantry parts first, then working my way down the list of rewards.  I hope to get them all out within a month, but we’ll see how things work out.

This also means that I’m about to start selling Kikori kits as well!  After all the changes and additions, it looks like I’ll just be able to keep it under the $5,000 goal, but I’m going to try to do a special introductory sale to get things moving.  I’ll send out an announcement soon!

Ok, so we’re really getting close now.

3 days left and just $1300 left to raise.  Hopefully, this new reward will help us get over this final hump.

Allow me to present the cleverly-named vial box!

I designed this box after noticing that several friends of mine who are fans of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (commonly known as BPAL) had piles of these small vials called ‘imps’ with no good way to store them.  Some people use bullet boxes, but this requires wrapping the label around the imp, and makes it impossible to tell at a glance what you’ve got.

I knew I could do better.

After playing around in my CAD program I came up with this clever system that would hold each imp in such a way as to make all the labels easily read and each imp accessible.  It also closes securely, keeping the imps safe from harmful sunlight.

The box is 10″ x 9.75″ x 3″, holds fifty imps, and I’ll do a custom bit of inlay work on the lid! It’s available now for a pledge of just $60!  Hurry, the project ends Sunday!

The 2′x4′ Kikori is out!

The MDO parts are available now for just $400, but hurry; I’m only offering five at that reward level.  After that, they’ll go up to $500.

The reason they aren’t cheaper is because  only nine pieces actually change between the 4′ version and the 2′ version.  However, this also means that the 2′x4′ Kikori gantry has the ability to upgrade itself by making only nine new pieces!

I’m also offering the mechanical and full kits at reduced reward levels: for the first three backers the mechanical kit is only $2000, and the full kit just $2500!

In other news, since the Artisan’s Asylum is going to be moving to a new location, it’ll be closed during the month of August.  This means that even if I got the Kikori set up there for July, I’d have to turn right back around and tear it down again, and then have no place to work for an entire month.  As you can imagine, I was not happy about this prospect, so I got to work finding some place to work.

I remembered that Joseph Schlesinger, one of the guys who helped me build the the blackFoot at the Asylum, had just moved MakeIt Labs (a “Makerspace/Hackerspace/Open-Access Workshop”) into a new space up in Nashua, so I shot him an email asking if I could set up the Kikori there.  Sure enough, a few emails later and he’d talked his board into letting me set up shop there for a couple months!  This means I’ll be able to get rewards out for the Kickstarter project much sooner.

I’ve also been hard at work finishing up another reward: the launcher!

While it’s designed to launch tennis balls, it’ll launch pretty much anything under 4″ in diameter: water balloons, snow balls, confetti…  It’s designed to be adjustable, so you can alter its strength without swapping out the elastic.

I can imagine all sorts of uses for this, from playing fetch with your dog to ambushing your friends with blasts of glitter.  However, I know I’ve just barely scratched the surface.  What would you use something like this for?

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the $600 reward on my Kickstarter Project.

Many people were asking if the MDO pieces came with any mechanical components as well, which they do not.  However, as the questions kept coming (long after I added the answer to the FAQ section), I realized that people might want this option.

I had held off on this before now because most of the necessary hardware can be bought locally.  However, I also know that those parts that cannot be sourced locally can be a royal pain to find.

I eventually decided to bite the bullet: I did some research, found some additional sources of various parts, crunched some numbers, and finally came up with two new rewards:

The first kit, available at the $2500 level, will have all the mechanical parts necessary to build a Kikori gantry.  This means it comes will all the nuts, bolts, cross-dowels, aluminum rails, sprockets, roller chain, and other various mechanical bits that are needed to put a Kikori gantry together, as well as the MDO gantry pieces themselves.

The second kit will be available for $3300, and will have everything the first one does plus the stepper motors, electronics, cables, and router!

Neither kit comes with a computer or a table, since the former depends on personal taste and the latter would be far too big to ship.

What do you think?  Are there other possible combinations you’d like to see?  Let me know!

Last Friday we finally launched our project on Kickstarter! We’ve already gotten 12% of our goal and were mentioned on BoingBoing!

Right now we’re working on more rewards, so if there’s something particular you’d like to see, let us know!

There are two great open source CNC projects on kickstarter right now: The ShapeOko mini CNC machine shown to the left, and the DIYLILCNC redesign shown below.

Both appear to be made out of laser-cut MDF, and both plan to make the final plans freely available so that anyone could have their own set of parts cut out by their own local hackerspace or services like Ponoko.  As you all know I’m a big fan of this open approach to design, so seeing it catch on is very encouraging.

The ShapeOko is a great little machine that appears to be primarily glued together.  While its small size is limiting, it also makes it very portable, which I know is one of the things people appreciate about MakerBot’s 3D printers.  The project also mentions that this is just one of three designs in development, so I’m very curious to see how those machines differ from this one.

The DIYLILCNC is a larger, older design that the project’s creators are looking to update.  They’re also doing an interesting thing with their rewards: they’re letting backers vote for which improvements they’d like to see implemented.  I think this is a great idea, and I’m looking forward to seeing which improvements make the cut.

However, what I’m curious about is what you all think of these designs.  If you’re here reading this, you’re probably interested in CNC technology, open design, or both, and I’d love to know what you like (and don’t like) about these designs.  I ask this because (as I’ve mentioned before) I’m gearing up to launch my own Kickstarter project soon, and I’d love to incorporate your feedback into where I take my own designs.

So: what do you think of these?

First image from shapeoko.com | CC3.0

Second image by Chris Reilly/Taylor Hokanson/DIYLILCNC

Last night I went back to the Artisan’s Asylum for the first time since getting back.

The blackfoot CNC router I built back in the fall is still in regular use and seems to be holding up well.

It’s being run by my friend Jeffrey, who’s been teaching classes in Computer Aided Machining (CAM) software (which you can sign up for here!).  While the idea was to build up a solid base of people who can use the machine, it was hard for me to gauge how often it’s actually getting used.  I also noticed a few things about the current state of the machine; some good, some bad.

The good:

• The stepper motors are running very quietly; I suspect that this is due to the switch to a g540 stepper motor driver setup which is properly tuned.  I have the same setup, but for whatever reason I was unable to properly tune mine (I suspect that I was using the wrong tool).
• Limit switches have been added so that the machine can auto-home.
• Our friend Calvin made a switch for the router so that it can be turned on and off by EMC2.
• A slot cut into the vacuum mount  makes loosening the collet nut possible without removing the router from the gantry.
• A ring of LEDs  on the underside of the vacuum mount helps illuminate the cutting area.

The bad:

• The aluminum rails show significant wear from the v-groove bearings.  While this should not effect the accuracy of the machine in the X and Y axis, it might cause slight variation in Z, especially towards the ends of the axis where the wear is less even.
• Apparently the shaft of the Y axis stepper motor snapped off during a long job not too long ago.

Those two issues are also things that might affect the Kikori; thankfully I already have solutions in mind for both that I’ll implement as soon as I have it back up and running.

Speaking of reviving the Kikori, I saw the space for it; unfortunately it’s full of stuff which will have to be moved.  Since I don’t know whose stuff it is or where it should go, I can’t move forward on setting up my space.  However, I’ll be meeting with the guy who’s currently renting the space to get all that figured out soon.

In the meantime, my Kickstarter project is almost ready!  Just a few more things to set up and it’ll be ready to launch.  Stay tuned!

I realized a while ago that in order for my business to succeed, it was crucial that I establish a name for myself.  Once I decided to use Kickstarter to raise startup funds, it became necessary to start on that sooner rather than later which, as I see it, is another advantage of using Kickstarter.

To this end, I’ve started a serious attempt at using social media tools.  Sindrian arts now has a facebook page at facebook.com/sindrianarts, a twitter account @sindrianarts, and of course this blog, which can be reached through sindrianarts.com.  However, the real challenge  is getting into the habit of using all three of these regularly.  Of the three, I think I’m doing the best at Twitter, since it’s fairly easy to find neat stuff to comment on and re-tweet.  However, I really need to post here more often, and I’m still figuring out how to best use the facebook page.

Now, before I can actually start my Kickstarter project, there are still a few things I need to do.  First off,  I need to finish the design for the CNC gantry router so I have something to show people.  Second, I need to make a nice video for the project page telling people about my project.  Finally, I have to finalize my list of rewards for pledges.  I plan on having the first part done by Friday.  We’ll see how it goes!