Saturday, April 24, 2010

Action Video!

The Mantis 9 has been hard at work the last few weeks milling wax molds/models and lots of PCBs.  Here is a clip of it in action at 30 in/sec.  At this speed, a stepper driver board takes about 5 minutes to mill with full copper removal.

12 comments:

  1. I think that in you r description you meant 30in/min not per second...

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  2. Try to mill less deep. The white dust is glass/epoxy. The glass makes you cutter blunt.

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  3. Very nice! 5 minutes for a decent PCB that you could've designed minutes before. That's a great way to prototype. Plus copper clad board is cheap so even for low quantity production runs that would be useful!

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  4. I found the frame design but not the partslist for Mantis 9.1. This looks like the cleanest DIY mill design and I'm very tempted to build one. Could someone please point me to the right direction?

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  5. I also would love to see a parts list on the 9.1.

    This looks like an interesting beginning for people with an interest in CNC. The startup costs for most of the ones I have looked at is near $1000 so something 1/10th the cost would be very interesting for people interested in small scale projects.

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  6. Are you going to sell kits? It seems like you are and how much will they be? I know this PCB cost 100 dollars to build, but what is your resale cost??

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  7. This look likes a very interesting build, and one of the few that doesn't seem to require another cnc mill to build...however...any chance at a parts list? the video's seem to allude to some pretty specific parts that aren't defined anywhere....

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  8. Are you using acme or ball screws? What voltage/current are you running the motors at? It looks impressive @ 30in/min.

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  9. A parts list would be much appreciated

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  10. Found the BOM on the project website:

    http://makeyourbot.org/local--files/mantis9-1/bom-9.xls

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  11. Hey David, I've been following your Mantis 9 for a bit now. It or something like it is pretty much always in the back of my head. I've actually seen Jonathon Ward's machine at AS220 in Providence, but without taking anything away from that, yours seems like a simpler and therefore more elegant design.

    At any rate, I was looking at how you drill the center hole in the spindle shaft, and I thought I'd share a suggestion. If you have a vice attached to the drill press then you can put a drill bit backwards in the chuck, gripping the threads loosely so as not to damage them, then lower the bit until you can grasp the butt of the bit in the vice. Now if you put the spindle shaft into the drill press it should be centered on the drill bit.

    So thanks. I will get to building one soon...

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  12. Are there any high resolution close-up photos of PCBs that have been milled with a Mantis? The very few I could see seem to have ragged edges on the traces. I'm wondering how much backlash and friction there is while milling a PCB. A lot of people tell me that there is no such thing as a cheap CNC. I can find a few videos showing the Mantis in action but always without the final detailed result. I'm wondering if that might be due to the fact that the resulting PCB is not that great...

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About Me

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I'm a graduate student in Information Ecology at the MIT Media Lab interested in the creation of low cost machines that enable personal digital fabrication.