Finding a nice place to set up a workshop was a goal I set for myself a few months back when I outgrew my makeshift basement workshop.  I managed to find a commercial location that fits my needs nicely but it needed some serious internal remodeling.  Thankfully, because of the state that the place was in, the management company was more that willing to let me make a number of modifications to the property and lease it to me for a reasonable price.  I’ve been rather busy lately cleaning the place out, painting, moving stuff in, etc. and there’s plenty more left to do but it’s just getting to the point now were it’s a usable space. I’m super excited about having a nice work space with plenty of room for some larger scale projects!

(P.S. I’ve made a little bit more progress with the Cricut, so hopefully I’ll have some of the kinks worked out of my logging stuff soon and I can post some more detailed info on talking to the thing!)

A member at the hackerspace donated a Cricut 6″ cutter when she upgraded to the Expression model.  I’ve seen these little devices in most craft stores and even Wal-mart, and they seem ripe for the hacking.  The Cricut line of personal CNC paper cutters appear to have been looked into on a number of occasions from what I could find, but I didn’t really find any good resources for information on hardware hacking other than a couple simple hacks and the discovery that the Cricut USB link was actually an USB to RS232 connection.  I also didn’t find any open source or homebrew software to turn these devices from advanced scrapbook die cutters to general purpose CNC paper cutter/plotter/whatever.  I really want to play around with this thing (including trying to mount a spindle on it for crude PCB routing, among other things), but it looks like someone still needs to do a little leg work to make that happen easily.

What I did find is that there are  a few proprietary software packages out there (Sure Cuts A Lot and Make The Cut) that allow you to place and cut TrueType fonts and SVG format vector graphics.  This coupled with the fact that the device was using an RS232 link to do the actual communication to the on board microcontroller led me to believe it should be trivial to back-engineer the command protocol.  I downloaded the trial versions of the available 3rd party tools and grabbed a few windows serial port sniffing applications and set off to start logging communications.

Unfortunately I found that no combination of serial sniffer and control software seemed to work out.  I can easily use the serial sniffers to look at the transactions of the Arduino bootloader and the host application over the USB to RS232 link, but I see no activity with the 3rd party Cricut software.  I can set up a USB sniffer link and log data, but these logs are relatively verbose and I’d like to use a more elegant solution to log the RS232 data directly.

Since I’m more comfortable with the hardware side of things, I’m currently focusing on the problem from that angle.  I didn’t want to start chopping up the space’s Cricut, I set out to acquire my own for the task.  I managed to scoop one up for $60 with no cartridges from an individual who upgraded to the Expression as well.  Stay tuned for some hardware dissection notes as I take my personal unit apart!

Since I posted the spider ring on Thingiverse I’ve seen it pop up in a few places, like this video on the WSJ site.  In the latest edition of Make magazine (volume 21) it popped up again on page 49 in a line up of other interesting objects from Thingiverse.  It’s a weird feeling to know that someone else has actually made something I designed and threw on the internet.  Hopefully this kind of thing will happen more and more as “home fabrication” becomes more ubiquitous!

As far as my projects go, access to a CNC setup should allow me to skip the bootstrap section of my CNC mill design.  Hopefully CCCKC members will get some good use out of it as well!

As far as design goes, I’ve decided against the 1″ square tubing and skate bearings design pictured above.  It’s just too bulky for anything other than the X axis so I’m going to switch over the the more traditional precision ground shafts and bearings for linear guides on all axes at this point.  Other than being bulky, I like the design and will probably try to utilize it at some point in the future.  I’ve already acquired some shafts and bearings for testing this new setup but have yet to cut new bearing brackets to install on the boot-strap platform.   The overall design is on its second revision on paper with details for the X and Y axes specified and sketched up.  I’m looking at alternative linear motion setups that I could possibly fit within the specified budget so it may undergo another revision before I start cutting parts for the boot-strapped version.

This project will likely progress slowly for a bit longer as I seem to have outgrown my current work area.   I’m hoping to be able to move to a more suitable location in a few months time and set up a proper workshop, or at least that’s the plan.