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Thu 2 September 2021
All of the SCAMP hardware is now mounted properly inside the case, with no Arduino or breadboard required. I'm now well into the "long tail" of tasks on this project, where it takes increasingly large amounts of time to produce increasingly small improvements. Read more »
Sun 28 February 2021
I've put together the memory card for the SCAMP CPU, including the front panel with LEDs to show the bus contents and address register. Read more »
Mon 15 February 2021
The day after my first attempt at milling a PCB, my new tooling arrived (a 1 mm drill bit and a 10° engraving tool), so I had another go at making a PCB. Read more »
Fri 12 February 2021
I'm going to get most of the PCBs for SCAMP made by JLCPCB, but I'd like to try to mill the backplane on the CNC machine because it is both large (expensive at JLCPCB) and simple (single-sided, no vias, easy to make). Yesterday some small pieces of copper-clad board arrived and today I had a first attempt to see what would go wrong. Read more »
Fri 18 December 2020
I designed a puzzle for an escape room. The company ended up not wanting to pay for it, but I thought the puzzle was interesting enough to be worth making for myself anyway. Read more »
Sat 28 November 2020
I've made some aluminium keycaps on the CNC machine. I couldn't work out how to do the CAM in FreeCAD (although I think I have now roughly figured it out), so I instead wrote a program to render depth maps of STL files so that I could generate toolpaths with my pngcam program (github). Read more »
Sat 24 October 2020
I've been struggling with generating complex toolpaths in FreeCAD and thought that an easy approach would be to render a heightmap of the part, and then generating a toolpath from that should be easy. I understand that this is already a recognised technique, although I could not find an open source tool that would do it for me. Most of the heightmap-related stuff I found on DuckDuckGo was to do with auto-levelling the bed. And, anyway, it's a relatively simple idea and a fun challenge, so I did it myself. Read more »
Mon 5 October 2020
I have bought a "6040" CNC router, and have been getting to grips with how to use it. This journey started with converting the machine to Grbl because I'm not interested in running proprietary software. Once Grbl was all working correctly, I clamped a small piece of plywood to the bed, fitted a 2mm end mill and made my first cuts, manually "jogging" the tool position using the buttons in the UGS interface. Read more »
Wed 30 September 2020
The 6040 CNC machine comes in 2 flavours: parallel port and USB. I don't have a parallel port on the laptop I was intending to operate it with, so I chose the USB option. This is possibly a "mistake" as the USB option uses a proprietary USB interface board which is only compatible with Mach3 and therefore only compatible with Windows. But now that I've got it set up with Grbl, I think I prefer this system to what I would have with a parallel port controlled by LinuxCNC. Read more »