As This Smart House expands we keep adding great new toys to play with! Even though we are right in the middle of our Smart RV project, we had to take some time to get this baby up and running. To our collection of 3D printers and a laser cutter I’m exited to be adding the Sienci LongMill 30″ x 30″ CNC Router!
This project captured my interest many months ago when it was still a Kickstarter campaign, primarily because it seemed both well engineered and like printers such as the ANet A8 very “customizable”. First, many of the parts are 3D printed (nice if something breaks) — but even better, all of the design documentation is open source and available online as well! We’ve been itching to get a CNC for awhile now and these factors were enough to make me a backer.
One of the less common features of this CNC router as opposed to other kits is that it is designed to be mounted directly to your spoil board / table. That means of course in order to use it we had to build a table for it (keep reading for instructions!). Here’s what we came up with:
For this build here are the materials I used:
- 3/4″ MDF for the base of the table, as well as the spoil boards (a single 4′ x 8′ sheet)
- 1″ x 4″ boards for the structural support around the table (about 32′)
- 4″ x 4″ boards for the legs (about 15′)
- 36″ T-track (I specifically used six of these)
- A Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) w/Universal Gcode Sender installed
- A 24″ (I think) monitor I had laying around the garage
- This mountable monitor stand to mount the monitor to
- A small keyboard with built in trackpad to control everything (I used this)
I also designed (or downloaded) a couple of 3D printed parts to mount my electronics to the side of the table and out of the way. Specifically I used this Raspberry Pi 4 mount, and I designed a new foot for the stock LongMill Controller that adds mounting holes to mount it on the side as well.
[canvasio3D width=”500″ height=”500″ border=”1″ borderCol=”#F6F6F6″ dropShadow=”0″ backCol=”#000000″ backImg=”https://www.thissmarthouse.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/scratched-and-scraped-metal-texture-1.jpg” mouse=”on” rollMode=”on” rollSpeedH=”20″ rollSpeedV=”10″ objPath=”https://www.thissmarthouse.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Controller-Mounts.stl” objScale=”1″ objColor=”#00DD00″ lightSet=”7″ reflection=”on” refVal=”5″ objShadow=”off” floor=”off” floorHeight=”42″ lightRotate=”off” Help=”off”][/canvasio3D]
This is basically a drop-in replacement to the 3D printed feet found on the Sienci LongMill’s controller, and will let you mount the control box out of the way. You can print it yourself by downloading the STL here.
For those of you who are interested in my Sienci Longmill table build, I designed the whole thing digitally so you can download it yourself to see how the table was built (and copy my design if you want)
[canvasio3D width=”500″ height=”500″ border=”1″ borderCol=”#F6F6F6″ dropShadow=”0″ backCol=”#000000″ backImg=”https://www.thissmarthouse.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/scratched-and-scraped-metal-texture-1.jpg” mouse=”on” rollMode=”on” rollSpeedH=”20″ rollSpeedV=”10″ objPath=”https://www.thissmarthouse.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cnc-table-no-mill.stl” objScale=”1″ objColor=”#00DD00″ lightSet=”7″ reflection=”on” refVal=”5″ objShadow=”off” floor=”off” floorHeight=”42″ lightRotate=”off” Help=”off”][/canvasio3D]
If you’d like to download my design so you can build your own, you can find that here.
To power the whole thing, we are using a hacked 4-socket smart switch I have discussed before running our own custom CoogleIOT ESP8266 firmware. This will allow us to automatically turn on/off the controller, router, etc. as necessary.
That’s it for now! I am sure we’ll be exploring the power of the CNC machine more in the future, including content and posts on any further customizations I make.