The Shapeoko Forum

For a cheap option, I'm really surprised by how good this cheapo Chinese router bit is for facing, especially for $3. It's a 6mm x 22mm so you do need to be able to grab 6mm shank tooling, easy if you've got an ER spindle or whatnot, not so easy if you have a US market router. It does a particularly...

I've put lines of perfectly legible text about 1/16" tall onto brass valve tag blanks (No picture because I don't have one on hand that isn't an address or other PII). Your tram and clamping has to be perfect for it to look good, I usually surface off an area of spoil board to work on right before d...

The little AVR+Drivers controller they come with runs GRBL and should work with Linux (because it's basically just a serial device you stream gcode to) with any of several gcode senders. The different senders fake different collections of functionality in software but are all basically interchangeab...

I've been using bare A3144 type sensors for about two years and really like them. Installed on the ends of servo extension cables for convenient wiring, using little rare earth disc magnets taped to the extrusion to trigger. They only cost about $1.70/ea including the servo cables and such. No built...

Sorry to totally derail, at least the question was answered... Are there any [open source] motion control boards on M0+ parts in the wild right now? I was thinking of the LPC17xx designs because the promising Smoothie family stuff already has some traction. The LPCXpresso LPC1769 minimum-barrier-to-...

Right, I was only talking down about grbl a little bit ;) , it's pretty remarkable for still supporting 328p parts, and a lot of the Marlin magic is 3D printing specific. I was more remarking that the degree of separation between the additive and subtractive desktop manufacturing communities surpris...

I assume you're using a grbl device of some sort, AFIK, grbl doesn't currently support feed overrides, they have it on the desired list for 1.0 but it isn't there yet. The machine controllers that do the pulse generation/g-code interpretation/interface on the same host (Mach, LinuxCNC, etc.) can eas...

I've taken upper-level college electric drives courses and it takes me a while every time I have to think about steppers, they are subtly complicated things. I was sure I'd had this conversation here before, it turns out it was over 2 years ago . I'm still pretty pleased with that description, parti...

It could be the mineral oil lubricating, it could be the light hydrocarbons (mineral spirits/naptha) vaporizing and carrying away heat, it could be a combination thereof, the penetrating spray/WD-40 type substances are sometimes dual-acting that way.

Someone mentioned these earlier in the thread, but I'll voice support for the idea, I've had better luck engraving with spiral-ground engraving tools than simple V-bits, take a look at the Kyocera Tycom offerings for example, a while back I found a set of 10 of those, two each at five different angl...