Now that I made a cut in wax, my next step with the PocketNC was doing basically the same thing but in aluminum.  There is of course less room for error with the harder (but I suppose by no means actually hard) material.  It seems that I managed to use up a bit more luck than I expected, but still not too terribly costly so far.  My “learning moments” errr… goofs, so far:

Now that I have a PocketNC, the first thing I noticed was that I had a problem with noise volume.  The air compressor Pocket NC recommends is described as “quiet and durable”.  I can maybe believe the durable part, but quiet I have a harder time believing.

I’m running the machine in my home office and I measured the compressor at upwards of 85dB.  That’s about the same as a bulldozer.  Despite me adding some vibration damping padding, it also did a pretty good job shaking the whole house when in operation.

The primary UI the Pocket NC presents is a web interface accessible over a virtual USB based ethernet port.  I wanted to be able to run mine not immediately near an ethernet jack, but also didn’t want to have to tote a laptop over every time to check on it.  I had plenty of raspberry pi’s lying around, so rigged one up as a wifi bridge.

First, I found a random case to print from thingiverse, the TurboPi:

With my efforts to build a gearbox transmission and subsequent plans for a quadruped, there are a lot of parts which just can’t be made effectively from 3d printed plastic.  To date, I’ve sent out a few parts of the gearbox to CNC shops, which while effective, has a relatively slow turn around.  The best you can get without paying an arm and a leg is something like a week turnaround.  One thing I’ve learned from having a 3d printer on site is how transformative it is to be able to have single day turnaround for parts.  Thus, I thought I would experiment with CNC machining on a small scale locally and recently acquired a PocketNC V2-50.