Engineer In Wonderland

I finally found time to try out the home-modified 1610Pro desktop cnc. And here is the result: routed from 4mm thick cast Perspex with a 1mm deep letter ‘h’, all edges machined. The routed rectangular base is 27mm tall (as I remember) and is accurate to better than 100μm. The only error was 200μm in the total length of the ...

With lovely spare time over Easter, there was an opportunity to finish the little cnc project, and (give or take) that happened (right). Index to CNC-related Engineer in Wonderland blogs It started life as a ‘1610Pro’ cnc (left), bought to learn about cnc cutting, which revealed its slack and flexibility as soon as it was assembled. Not that it wasn’t ...

Adding linear rails to a length of aluminium extrusion is a common way to make a fairly rigid guiding structure, and I have been doing just that in the workshop. But things were not working quite right, and (very) eventually a subtle misalignment was discovered. An earlier version of this blog contained an error – see ‘False start’ below This ...

Back in 2021 I bought a little 1610Pro CNC machine (right) just to see how they work – it was just over £120 as I remember. It was great fun to play with, and a complete bargain, but let down by considerable slop and flex in its components, which must be much worse in the larger more popular 3018 version ...

Medium-sized cnc machines, which I am defining as those using NEMA 23 and 24 motors, need about 5A per stepper, usually mandating separate driver modules alongside a control board. However, 3d printer parts maker BigTree Tech, also known as Biqu (Shenzhen Biqu Technology), has recently released a 3d printer control board that includes four 8A 24-60V drivers – integrated right ...

There is a volunteer community behind the open-source Voron 3d printer series, which has produced several high-performance – literally world-class – desktop 3d printers, and now it looks like another community is trying to do the same for open-source desktop milling machines. It is the Millenium Machines project which: “started life out as a mod for the OpenBuilds mini mill, ...

Need to lay your hands on a 1,300V/µs amplifier module that can output ±12V into heavy loads? Look no further than headphone amplifier boards based on TI’s TPA6120A2, which are available all over the internet. I can take no credit for this discovery – it was pointed out in 2015 by tszaboo on this EEVblog community forum. In the IC, ...

While lithium ion cells have many wonderful characteristics, one of the great limitations is that they cannot be charged below 0°C. This statement, it turns out, is slightly glib as there is one Li-ion chemistry that can handle it: lithium titanate, it is usually called. And just a note here: not all lithium titanate cells are so blessed. One manufacturer ...

Leds revolutionised bicycle lights long before they even started to appear in exterior car lighting. There were lots of quite reasonable led-based headlamps for bikes… … and then it went mad… …as powerful leds appeared and allowed small companies with cnc equipment but no optical design expertise to produce cycle lights as bright as car headlights with uncontrolled beams that ...

First, an apology: This blog has been inactive for a while because covid reared its head again, and this time ‘brain fog’ was a feature, which led to getting nothing much done for a month or so…. Now the brain is back to some extent, I noticed a whole genre of transistor that I was ignorant of, and it seems ...