Transcript:
This same smart. CNC router is capable and costs Only $200 lets. See exactly what it can do. [MUSIC] I love CNC machining. In fact, you might notice in the intro of my videos. There’s a time-lapse of my CNC router machining of an f1 in school’s car. I’ve set up three similar machines to that one and the investment is significant at several thousand dollars And the fact that they’re not that affordable is the reason I don’t have much content of my CNC router on this channel, but today. I’m excited to present to you this. This is the same smart jinnie me. Two, thirty eighteen. CNC router, the best part. It costs only two hundred dollars. Were gonna start by looking at the specs, then unboxing, assembling and looking at the software that comes with this and our first cuts, the St. Smart Gen. Mitsu CNC rather is a do-it-yourself kit. The name 3018 refers to the machining size, which is 300 on the X 180 on the Y, with 45 millimeters of Z travel. It’s an update on the previous 30 18 Non-pro version. It has thicker extrusions so it should be made a little bit better, but apart from that, they’re more or less the same. It promises simple Assembly Open-source hardware. And if you want, you can also put on a laser module. I’ve got the link to that In the description as well. Now, importantly, here they’re claiming we can cut all types of plastics, soft aluminium, woods, acrylics and even Pcbs. For some reason? The price on the official website is a lot more expensive than on Amazon, where it comes in at only $200 us. As you can also see with my highlight. It comes with a one-year warranty, one accessory. That might be handy. Is his plug-in offline controller. I didn’t review this, but I’m gonna order one because it looks really good. This review unit was well packaged with foam and bubble wrap, protecting all of the components, which were kept separate from each other inside the box. The instruction manual is of high quality with nicely labeled features. And I found it sufficient to put everything together. This is a kit and there are a few components. But if you’re up to putting together bike in your furniture. I think you will be able to handle this fairly comfortably all up. It took me just over an hour to have it ready to run. I noticed a few rough edges on some of the components as I was assembling, however, noting that I consider a deal-breaker at this price and certainly nothing that can’t be overcome very easily with these things cleaned up. It was time to inspect the machine and it does seem very sturdy. Try as I might. I was unable to flex the frame and I was pleased to see that there were no gaps in between any of the plastic pieces and extrusions each axis is driven by lead screws with double sprung nuts for anti backlash. There’s no instructions for cable management, but with the wire wraps provided. I got it pretty neat. In the corner is the plug for offline controller and the Stepper motor drivers are DVR. Eighty eight, twenty five. The spindle is 24 volts and capable of just under 9,000 RPM. It has a collet on the end and takes 1/8 or 3.17 five millimeter bits. Its trouble is 45 millimeters. The machine comes bundled with a tiny compact disc and on that is a firmware upgrade with instructions software, which includes drivers and the G-code, sending program some test G code to see if the machine is working properly, A 3d animation of the outside of the machine and a PDF version of the printed instruction manual. Normally, the bundled software with these machines is terrible, But I was pleasantly surprised by this Goble Control Candle program here. I’ve loaded up one of the test files from CD and you can see below. It lists all of the g-code that make up that file on the right hand side. We keep track of our coordinates, and then we have the buttons here to manually jog the machine around. We can change the length of the step, as well as putting it to continuous, and we can also change the feed rate at which this happens, we also have a button for turning on and off the spindle manually. Then these machines don’t have end-stopped so generally, you need to pay attention to the zero point on the job and then use the jog controls to move it to the spot where you want that to be on your stock. When you’re happy with that, you can tell it that’s a zero point for X and Y as well as said after that is simply a matter of coming down to send to start the job, One thing that I really appreciate is the real-time preview of where the tool head is as the lines are cut, they become gray, and that gives you a nice visual indication of how much progress has happened and how much is yet to go. This job took just over 2 minutes and when it was done. I used a small vacuum cleaner to vacuum up the sawdust. Now the stock clamps can be removed to inspect to the workpiece. That’s a nice text engraving, so we’re off to a good start In my opinion, the clamping system that comes with this is a little bit cumbersome, especially since it needs a spanner not supplied in the kit. I decided to remove these two bolts and instead put in a spare m6 hex bolt, its lower profile and easier to tighten and loosen. The green pieces are just bits of cheap nylon chopping board to protect the router bed for the next job. I loaded up the dragon file from the CD, and it looked a lot more complicated as far as I could tell from the preview, it was a 3d relief of a dragon pattern for this one origin was in the center of the g-code, so I used two ruler to go from corner to corner Mark an X and then aligned the cutter with that. I started the job and everything was going quite well, but soon after I noticed that the control software had paused on my PC, It had crashed and with it. The job was lost. All I could do was reset the machine. This actually happened twice, so I switched to this little laptop that I use with my vinyl cutter and I’ve had zero problems. Since then this gave me a chance to measure just how loud The machine was during a cutting operation, A [Applause] lot louder than a 3d printer, but the foam underneath helped dampen the sound. I could see that the machine was doing a good job, so I let it run overnight. According to the laptop, it took about six hours and 40 minutes, but the end result was pretty cool. The dragon relief was captured with plenty of detail and with a little bit of sanding and oiling. I think this would look even better. The first cuts from this machine. We’re great once. I found a reliable USB connection, but the question was, could I replicate them myself and could? I expand what this thing could do to match everything on the website. It wasn’t perfect, but I did have a lot of success. So let me run you through now. The candle software that comes with the router is only for sending the g-code to the machine. We still need a way to generate our own g-code or my main machine. I already have paid licenses for mesh, cam and disk proto, and they’re both very powerful, but they’re certainly far from cheap for this video. I wanted some free solutions. A lot of people in the community groups were recommending easel and it does look very powerful and easy to use, but the things. I wanted to do cost money as well for all of my 2d work. I decided to use Carbide. Create it’s fairly easy to use, but the best news is it’s completely free. Here’s a brief rundown of how it works. We start with our settings and setting the stock size. That’s the piece of material that we’re going to be cutting into, we said well. We want the toolpath zero to be. That’s our starting point. We need to align the machine with we can also set our material. This is also where you set either inches or millimeters. Now we switch to the design tab and we have a bunch of inbuilt tools for creating vectors. If we wanted to try some engraving, we can use the text tool. Most things in this program work like you would expect. We can set height width change the font, as well as the actual text, there’s also some great import options with inbuilt library elements. If we come to Docs, for instance, we can bring in these vectors, and now they’re available for our machine to cut the other thing we can do is import SPG’s from other programs. If you have an image that you’d like to vectorize, there’s plenty of free websites that can do that for you. Depending on the website that you choose, you’ll have some degree of freedom on how the finished picture turns out. And when you’re happy, you can download an SVG back in Carbide create. We can now bring in this file. When we’re finished creating our 2d artwork, we come up to tool path the option. I prefer to do was called contour and one of the first things you’ll need to do is to edit your tool. Edit the library and then add a custom tool. You can copy the settings. I have on the screen to mimic the V bits that come with the machine. And if you antics at speeds automatically, you’re able to input the exact parameters you want such as setting how fast the cutter moves around and the depth of cut the way this machine works is that the spindle speed ranges from zero to a thousand, so for things like timber? He generally wanted at full speed and you should set it to. 1000 feedrate is the sideways moving speed and for a shallow cut like this, you can have it as fast as 1000 plunge rate is the speed of the vertical movement up and down. Our main options down here are pocket tooled machine out the inside as we can see highlighted in blue, we can cut around the outside of something we can cut out an internal pattern of something or we can trace immediately over the top with no offset. When we’re done, we hit. OK, and we can even have a preview by clicking show simulation, however, I found on these really shallow cuts. The simulation can show very accurately when we finish creating our processes. We come to save G code and download the file. Please pay attention to this doc here. That’s the origin that you need to move your cutting bit to before you start the job, So what if you wanted to? Create a 3d relief like the Test Dragon, Especially if you have an unhealthy obsession with Chuck Norris to do that, we can import a JPEG into our favorite little fan program, this one. I’ve made a video on before. Simply bring it in, make sure it’s set to flat and then download as an STL, another piece of free software. I’ve made a video on one much earlier. Is Curie Moto. It covers FDM printing laser cutting and CNC milling and after you set up a custom device by simply putting in the size of our machine and also set up the tool here, I’m setting up a VB as an end meal by putting it as a point. One millimeter diameter tip you can then program your feeds and speeds on the right hand side here. I’m running a water line and very close together. Linear X pattern. And here we can see now that the preview is finished. The water line is going to trace around the deeper elements, and then it’s going to zigzag back and forth, creating the contours of the face. When you’re happy, you simply come to export. Give your file a name and then download the g-code ready to send to the machine. We can also use key remote. Oh, for machining other 3d geometry here. F created a simple gear in Tinkercad and I’m going to come up and export an STL. I can now drag the STL to the middle of the platform and set up another tool in this case, an end meal that I picked up cheaply off ebay to cut around the outside. All we want is waterline on with a step-down of something like 1 millimeter. Make sure you select the right bit. And another set you might like to click is depth first, which will ensure the center is cut out before the outside because when the outside is cut, the whole piece will become loose. One final note for Kiri Moto is that the origin is always in the center and top of the piece when we feed G code from either of these programs. Sometimes we get errors, but that’s normal. It’s putting in tool change G code. But we only have one tool on this CNC so we can safely Click ignore before we look at results, a quick word on safety. These V bits that come with the CNC are extremely sharp. These N Mills aren’t sharp when they’re not spinning, but if they are, your finger will be destroyed. Another hazard is making sure you put down the clamps in the corners away from the actual tool path to avoid collisions and although it doesn’t come with them. A set of safety glasses is a must when we’re dealing with this machine. All right, let’s look at some results. I started with some basic shapes from Carbide create and they turn out really clean, so I thought I would try The same process on some acrylic acrylic is harder because the edges can melt as it’s cutting, but the end result is still fairly clean. The middle text is very clear, but unfortunately. I had to stop it early because the TT logo on the right was off the edge and going to collide with the clamps next up. I thought I’d try my luck with alloy. It’s exactly the same g-code, but with much slower feed rates. I also added some water to help collect the chips and cool and lubricate the cutting bed. These fine V bit. Cutters are not really suited to aluminium, but after I sanded back the surface. It did look fairly clean. The Miss Shape led us at the start from where I had the feed right to fast and everything started to flex next up A PCB and the benefit is you only need to tape down the copper board to something solid. This is a PCB. I designed a long time ago, but it came out really clean, and you could do additional programming if you wanted to drill out the holes as well as cut out the exterior of the PCB, So it was all automated on the one machine so on to the 3d things. And how did Chuck Norris turn out well? You can definitely tell it’s him so. I think that’s a success. This probably would have been better if I picked a hardwood that didn’t have such obvious paws to get in the way of his face. This is a technique. I’ve used a lot in the past and it scales up really well. We could potentially do 300 by 180 millimeters time to cut out that gear that I made in Tinkercad and you need to mount your material raised from the bed with something sacrificial underneath. So on the cutter breaks through to the bottom, It doesn’t damage your machine for this. I use the eighth inch end mill that you saw a little bit earlier, and I think I had the feed rate. Just a little bit too fast. A bigger cutter. Removing more material generates a lot more waste as well. This finished with a little bit of melted plastic on the rim that can chip off if you’re patient. But even so, the final result is something. I’m pleased with shallower passes and perhaps a slightly faster feed rate might have improved the result. So how about the same design in aluminium? I slowed things right right down and once again used water as coolant. The chips coming off here are actually encouraging. It means the cutting tool is taking just enough of a bite out of the material. On every rotation, it took a long time to achieve, and I accidentally stopped it a little bit earlier, which gave it a bit of a flared base, but the result is not too bad for such a cheap machine. The potential was definitely there to make some pretty cool projects. The only thing left now is the cleanup for only $200 This machine has been quite impressive and one thing. I should mention is the thriving community. There’s a Facebook page with many generous and knowledgeable users and the file section They provided is a treasure trove, given the cheap price of the machine, the safety net of that community group And the fact that you can use free software as I’ve demonstrated in this video to achieve a range of projects. Then I’m happy to give this thing my recommendation for a beginner looking to get into CNC machining. If you’ve got any questions or thoughts on this, please leave them in the comments below. Thank you so much for watching and until next time happy. CNC routing You. Gday, it’s Michael again. If you liked the video, then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click. 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