hey everybody its norm from tested and I am so thrilled to have two guests here
in our studio today this is bar and Hannah you guys work on the Maslow right
the Maslow CNC device which is right behind us
this is one of the biggest things we've brought to our studio ever and parking
actually what is what is Maslow so Maslow is a open source four by eight
foot CNC router it comes with a kit and basically our goal is to make CNC
routing especially big seen through outing accessible to everyone and we
really we knew we needed to have it be four foot by eight foot to work with
plywood and it's like native form and we also need it had to be affordable and
affordabl to ship and so the whole thing is two hundred fifty dollars and ships
in a box that's like yay big as a kit and then you go to Home Depot and buy a
sheet of plywood and some two by fours and some bricks and the other that's
kind of mind-blowing because it said three hundred and fifty dollars in a box
that you can you can get an assemble and then do amazing projects like this coat
rack which I am immediate in love with a big fan of the Sutro Tower and this is
made on a Maslow yeah right so I'd love to hear about the story of how this
project came to be because this isn't your first
CNC the vise you guys have made you also kick-started the the make Smith which is
a desktop CNC so what are your origins and why are you designing the CNC
machines so in college I had a laser cutter I worked in the lab that had
laser cutter and I totally fell in love with like design something digitally and
then watch it become real and I wanted to have that sort of be accessible to
more people I wanted more people to have that experience and so I did a desktop
CNC router did a Kickstarter for it you know it was good we shipped it on time
and I sort of ran out of things to make just cuz in that smaller sort of space I
realized that the things I wanted to build were really you know furniture or
you know things that were human scale and so I've wanted to build a bigger
machine but the bigger machines that are out there are all in sort of the 15 to a
hundred thousand dollar range and I just wasn't in my budget and they also take
up a tremendous amount of space because they're normally flat so the goals for
this project were that it had to be had to fit in one car garage had to be under
$500 what else was it had to fit in the box more expensive to ship than it is to
put the parts feeling right yeah and we hear that a lot from people who maybe
are buying desktop C and C's or just off laser cutters they always want the
bigger bed space right like those desktop machines are great to learn
about vectors and design and to prototype and iterate fast but if you
want to build something like furniture it's always really nice to have a really
big canvas to work on and the design of the maslow is unlike you know looking at
other CNCs there are more bigger and more expensive like if you talked about
they're all you all ate the we were four by eight on a table this is almost like
on an easel how did you end up on this kind of design to have it and how does
it work so the how did we end up on this design was actually so we're here for
Maker Faire and actually because we were at Maker Faire doing the desktop CNC
router and someone came up to our booth and we were just chatting he was like
I've always wanted to do an upright one so it wouldn't take up all the space in
my garage and I thought that was the coolest idea and I just started thinking
about if once you go upright what you know it you know if you take a regular
CNC you can flip it up right and it would still work but you suddenly start
to have gravity be a factor absolutely and so if you make gravity work for you
you can basically use it to your advantage
well let's take a look at the anatomy of this machine I'd love of you guys could
run me through exactly what's going on it clearly a 4x8 big sheet of ply right
you guys bought from Home Depot but when I think of CNC I think of like how many
axes the machine has so you need at least two to do something really
interesting three if you want z-depth how is the two axis work so thanks and
why the the it is a three axis machine it's two by default and then you can
a third if you want basically what happens is these two motors are their DC
motors with the gearbox and an encoder so they're very precise we get very
precise movement out of them and it's a closed loop control system and these
motors adjust the length of these chains and by knowing the length of those
chains very precisely you can define exactly where the where the router ends
up in your four by eight sheet so it's a little bit more complicated than your
standard XY system but it's same basic principle you have two axes and you end
up with two degrees of freedom and you want these change to be extremely taut
so you have that precision the motors give you a lot of precision already and
then it's at a slight angle because you're also working against gravity
don't want to pop up actually notice you have two big bricks attached to this
care system here which guys push the router right against the board yeah
that's that's exactly right and those are just those can be sort of anyways we
had a guy in Lao email us and he said I can buy plywood but I can't buy bricks
can I use you know make my own oh yeah yeah you're like yeah why not Wow so in
terms of setting this up because we've been setting this up all morning you
know everything comes in comes in a box so there's the carriage you have the
bricks that your customers or users supply their own weighted system they
supply their own their own router and end mills and what comes what comes in
the box I guess and what do people have to put together the box is pretty much
everything that you see that's metal - the router more or less obviously the
motors are super important the chains like we've been talking about but then
there's just a bunch of like small and larger pieces of hardware that keep
everything in place so even down to the wood screws that that you see that are
like holding the frame together that's all part of the kit what you get shipped
so you had all the hardware people provide their own 2x4 or so their own do
you find that people who are now you're shipping them already the people have
designed their own stands for it or is everyone pretty used much using the
designs that you guys have put out and
I'd say that most people end up redesigning the frame there been a
couple a couple people did hanging ones so they can flip it up to the roof of
their garage when they're not using it or against a wall so that you know it's
at a slight angle so you just tilt it out a little bit
people have done plasma cutter modifications people have you know it's
open source with the goal of you can really take it and do whatever you want
with it and you're actually mounting your
material directly is it is it locked into the frame it's there's like a jig
that locks it into place using calibration is gonna be really important
so it knows what part of the material are cutting yeah so basically you
because the base is also for bite you can just clamp it with regular c-clamp
edges and the registration of this piece is actually not quite as critical though
having having exact registration between this and the frame itself is very
important but if you shift this a little bit it just shifts your cut you know you
don't you don't get a distorted cut or anything weird and unexpected like that
all right no with this two axis system are your cuts more precise and in
certain parts of your material like toward the center because if it's going
toward the end it's gonna be more taxing on one motor than the other yeah that's
a that's a really good question so I think our biggest thing that we didn't
see as an issue going into before we started shipping and it's actually a
pretty big issue is it has to very precisely know its dimensions in order
to do the math because it's very nonlinear so we've been working through
the process of how do you set it up and do some test cuts in order to make make
sure that your machine is precise everywhere mm-hm and where we are so
we're still in our beta phase and our goal is sort of plus or minus a 64th of
an inch across the whole 4x8 sheet and right now we can do substantially better
than that in kind of the middle region but as you get like right up here we're
more like a sixteenth of an inch right now but I think well we'll get that
figured out in the next couple weeks and there's a lot of that just software
improvements and and just we working the code in iterating yeah its software
improvements and it's figuring out how to make it easy for
people to enter to get everything set up right because really the math doesn't
need to change it's just a matter like when we first shipped we were just like
we'll just measure your machine and enter the numbers and that turned out
not to be precise enough so now we do this system wasn't in my idea we're open
source so someone else is like Mina came out this idea that you take one of the
chains and you string it from one motor to the other motor and then it pulls
itself tight and then it knows exactly how far that distance yeah right using
the exact same materials that it's using yeah Halle Berry yes thanks hi
and then the interface itself so you take a vector file it's SVG files and do
you have a piece of software that creates that work path yeah well Barr
programmed our software is called ground control but yeah pretty much you have to
it takes in g-code files which is like pretty much standard for all CNC
machines so you'll have to convert your SVG or whatever into G code and then
ground control will read that and and do the cut and I notice that you have like
the best version of the mazza right now with your Z access there's you have an
optional you have your dust collector but this is something that people can
just set up like in a garage that was kind of a the goal this if you have a
garage that can fit a four by eight you can make these big cuts and make some
furniture we don't have the time to make a full chair today or one of these Sutro
coat racks even though I really love one but I'd love to see a test cut if
possible can we start this up and make something and see how it works yeah
that's that's constantly out awesome do it so we're just gonna open up an SVG
file here and so this is a sword cool so you right now you're in a web interface
this is a website called maker cam yeah this is a website called maker cam and
basically it's it's so the machine uses g-code which is sort of the industry
standard for controlling CNC routers and we can work with pretty much any any
g-code source that you want so if you already have like you know you like
using autocad and they're they're g code or autocad fusion 360 you can you can
just continue to use that we recommend maker cam because it's pretty pretty
straightforward I think it works well and it's great for
these two excess designs yeah exactly exactly so now we need to tell maker cam
a little bit of information about about the machine itself and so in order for
it to cut so the first thing we're gonna do is select the thing when I cut and
then just say we want to cut around the profile of it so we'll tell it the size
a bit we're gonna use which is a quarter of an inch we'll tell it how thick are
wood is which yeah so let's just call it point four five just yeah okay get
ourselves a little extra and I guess one of the advantages that this being
upright is that you're there's no backing material you're gonna worry
about cutting into it just goes all the way through yep exactly we do usually
throw a piece of waste board behind it you know sheet of MDF or something like
that just to spare the machine from I'm cutting it mmm
and then you just said how deep you want it to cut with each pass and how fast
you want it to cut and our machine is not as fast as something like a shop
we're really not looking for you know like a production environment where
you're like manufacturing something it's sort of like a home hobby kind of
environment that's if we just tell it to you calculate that path see you know
there's a green line just around the the profile yep so that's where we're gonna
cut so it's offset by the width of the bit just to make sure that your your
final part is the size of your SVG file rather than yeah you know we do still
yeah yeah all the states for the kerf and let's add some tabs to it just so
that it stays in place now here in our software you can see we were previously
cutting some swords we'll just open up that file and there's our sorry awesome
and then within your software ground control you can you can move where your
start position is this image right here is what the system knows about your your
your morgue right exactly so it's all pre calibrated yep exactly and that's
that's why we do a calibration step so it no
where it is and it remembers that between powering it on and off so you
really only have to do that one time when you sit in the machine mm-hmm
is that so that you can use one sheet and just cut as many until you have
holes in it and have as many things cut out as possible yeah yeah maximize that
she will the system retain information of past cuts it does not it would be
nice to have sort of a drop-down of here's all my sheets because it knows
where you've cut things from each sheet right just be a matter of storing that
information and letting you recall it right and not have to make those cuts
again but somehow visualize that yeah and exactly exactly well and this is all
of our software or firmware or hardware is completely open source so we see a
lot of a lot of our features are things that have been added by the community
because some want someone will want that and they'll just make it and then add it
and then everyone gets to benefit awesome I think we're ready to make our
cut perfect let's get started
okay so about 20 minutes later we have I see a very clear outline that is ass or
very cool there are tabs here which I know you designed as you're making the
g-code is to remove those what's that process like so we're just going to cut
those with a with a saw in our shop we usually use one of those vibrating saws
for a flush cutting it works really well you just zip zip-zip and then you can
just sand those off if you don't want to leave any sort of mark oh very cool okay
so I'll let you do that you can use any type of handsaw now you know when you
guys you guys have this setup in your shop right
what's safety like I'm sure that when you meet people at Maker Faire or with
all or think about backing this and reordering it the question is it it
looks pretty exposed how does this compare to a different type of CNC yeah
I mean it's definitely comes up because it looks pretty kind of raw you know but
really what makes it even safer than most ents is the fact that this is all
this is all contained and the the bit spinning you would really have to try to
get in there and you know hit your fingers or something like that and
otherwise I mean it is heavier you know there's there's some weight obviously in
the bricks that you know you could drop something on your toe or something like
that but generally we say it's really safe like I've never hurt myself using
it I don't think we know that anyone has so and this whole thing like this is a
big thing yes will fit in your garage but if someone wanted to get the Maslow
kit and maybe not have it cut a full four by eight cuz you can go to a
hardware store and get before my head cut in half or you could is this
configurable is it scalable to be smaller yeah yeah the calibration
process will fix all that for you so if you say you want to just use half of
this and you know have it be a four by four format or even two by two is
something that a lot of people ask about it's really easy to just modify your
frame you know as long as you feel comfortable
sort of changing the size of the frame then the machine will do that for you or
you could even build a frame with that in mind and have it be a smaller
footprint if you wanted to do that that's totally possible cuz it's doping
yeah yeah and and the people using the Mauser right now are already making
their own versions it looks like oh absolutely yeah there's a there's a huge
community in our forums of people who are modifying it and doing their own
making it their own Wow let's take a look at this piece all right that is a
routed sort that's so cool yeah this is gonna be a huge hit maker yeah no way
she's gonna walk up and want to walk away with swords we're a little bit
worried are angry parents if we give them swords and like it's not okay to
have them make it themselves it's possible so what's next like is the idea
that you guys gonna keep on making these keep improving it what are the
improvements gonna be and what are your long-term plans yeah so our real goal is
just to push this idea this technology we love CNC and we love the idea that
people can make something digitally share it with people around the world
and then have it become a reality as you you know take something digital and make
it real so we just want to push this technology and make it more accessible
to more people so it's not necessarily about us being the the sort of sole
providers of this kind of thing we we're open-source because we want to see other
companies take this idea and adapt it we think there's a ton of niche markets out
there for people building different types of things they would want to
modify the machine for a lot of applications this two horsepower router
is just too big yeah so we we look you know worse is designed to cut plywood
you could build one that was designed to cut foam for making RC airplanes so you
could you can you can take it in a lot of different directions which is
something we're really excited to see people do
yeah the scalability isn't just in the canvas size it really also the type of
router you use because you've done the hard work which is the math of getting
an upright CNC to work using gravity yep and we when we did all of that we
designed it in such a way that it's easy to adapt a different thing so if you
want to do a 50 foot one that goes across the side of a building and draws
murals it should be pretty plug and play to make that
make that a reality so we're really we're really excited to see what people
do with the open source technology that we're putting out there and for people
who want to buy um as low you can buy the box so they get some your flat rate
shipping box get all the hardware and they can build one what do you guys
shipping if you have some pre-orders like today that we're aiming to ship by
the end of the summer so we're doing August September is kind of what we've
been telling people but yeah they ordered today that would be hopefully by
September they'd have their mouth as well you know I would love to get one
set up in my garage to test it cuz something like this coat rack
I can't can't say enough great things up is this it tells you exactly like I know
the scope of what a laser cutter can do what I could desktop see and so you
could do but you can't make this unless you're cutting in the large sheets of
ply absolutely well it's great to meet you guys thank you so much for coming to
our studio and we'll see you at Maker Faire see you Maker Faire thank you so
much for having us thank you