Open Gantry

[Matthew Gardner]

I posted as bit about our project on the introduction page, but I wanted to create a post so we could get further feedback, and discussion going.

Ken Sherrif, Alistair Milne, Tim Hatch, and I have been working on an open source, self replicating cnc designed for producing wikihouses as a 20% project at work. Our goal is to produce a full size version that a user can feed in sheets of plywood, that will spit out ikea style flat pack houses that slot together and do not require construction experience or power tools to build. We are shooting for building these as kits an order of magnitude cheaper than  the lowest cost competing cnc. Wikihouse.cc is a very cool idea, but getting a CNC with an 8X4 ft cut envelope is very expensive. We also believe that your stock CNC machines are not perfectly designed for cutting wikihouses. A machine could be made which is designed only to cut wikihouses. Upon researching the cost, the cheapest option out there is the blackfoot at $3200 for a kit. We have done our research, and although the prototypes will cost closer to 400-500, we think that if we build kits in volume, we can get cost down to $300-400. 

We are aiming to have the electronics installed and working by end of next week. We still have quite a bit to assemble from what we built on Friday. 

We are going to open source everything under creative commons license, and have everything up on github.

We are considering rolling our own stepper driver shield for arduino, and software for generating the tool paths, as well as taking the skill out of CNC which will be required if we want to ship these off to third world countries/disaster zones.

We would love any feedback, suggestions, or help from those well versed in sketchup and building CNC's.

[Paul Pangrazzi]

Fantastic start and effort. I can't offer any technical support on the project, but will participate in any manner I can.

【ツ】paul

[nick]

Nice work so far Matthew!  I am looking forward to the cable stay drive mechanism. 

[Matthew Gardner]

Hey Paul,

We would love help. We have a ton of tasks.

We have CAD tasks

We have Electrical engineering tasks (More in depth look at rolling our own arduino based stepper controller for large Nema23 5A stepper motors)

We have Software tasks

We have Fabrication tasks (if you have a laser cutter/cnc/3d printer)

We have clerical tasks (Documentation/repository organization/wiki page curation)

We have platform tasks (getting a raspi to boot a slimmed down linux which boots directly to our software)

We have part sourcing tasks (dealing with Chinese manufacturers to quote out parts for kits. Note: this is not for profit, kits will be sold at cost, as a service to the community) 

We would absolutely love any help anyone is willing to contribute.

[Matthew Gardner]

We have been dealing with the process of getting Google's approval to open source the files for our CNC, but we are almost there.

I wanted to post an update since its been a while. Our machine is alive and working. We have done many tests, and lots of tweaks. The machine came together quickly, and then progress slowed, but It has been operational for a while.

We learned a lot of lessons in the first build. I have no doubt the mechanical engineers in the room can spot many of the problems : )

We are looking into building a second version of this machine which fixes many of those problems. You might also notice that we rely pretty heavily on 3d printed parts. We hope to convert all of these to wood later which can be cut on the CNC. It seems to us the biggest priority is a full size CNC designed for cutting wikihouses which costs < $500 is more important than being self replicating. 

We need to organize all the files a bit, create a bill of materials, and write up some instructions for the machine. 

We would absolutely love to work with anyone who is interested in building one of the machines. We will provide extremely detailed instructions, guidance, information about lessons learned, and a place where people can post modifications and lessons they learned.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Matthew Gardner]

By the way, the total cost for this machine came in at ~$300 (this is 1:4 scale). We have done the sourcing of parts, and we think that full scale version can come in at roughly $450 total not including router bits. 

[nick godfrey]

That is sick!!! I was just thinking about this project earlier today. I am so excited to see all the progress. Definitely want the information A.S.A.P. I would be happy to test this machine out!

Nicholas

[Danny Squires]

Hi matt, 

Great work you've done! We often mention the Google 20% project when we are pitching and your work on developing an accessible CNC for WIkiHouse. Were very interested in testing this out down under.

Danny

WikiHouse /NZ

[Hello WikiHouse]

AMAZING

Super excited about this! Al to post shortly...

- Sarah

--

WikiHouse Team

To find out more, join the community, or to support the project, please visit

www.wikihouse.cc

[Alastair]

To borrow Nick's word, this is... "sick"! 

Utterly incredible. This is going to change the game. 

Shall we do a tweet-out to help you find other test-builders? If so, is there a web-link / name / ID to the project we can send people to, or just bring them here?

Al. 

[Matthew Gardner]

Thanks for all the encouragement!

Lets hold off on the tweet-out for a few days. I need to finalize the open-sourcing, and get all of the files posted as well as the BOM. I also want to post some videos of it in action.

To those who have expressed interest in being alpha testers, we will start prepping everything.

Matt

[Matthew Gardner]

Sorry for the delay. The approval from Google to open source it came a day before my 5 week vacation.

All files, bill of materials, detailed pictures, and instructions have been uploaded to http://google.github.io/open-gantry/

The machine is in alpha status. It is a work in progress. If you plan to build this, plan to spend at least 50% of the time calibrating, tweaking, testing, and repeating. This has only been tested in 1:4 scale by novice users of open source CNC software. There will still be lots of lessons to learn while building this, and we would love to work with people willing to document their build, and work with us to overcome the problems you encounter. If a part is not working as well as it could, let us know. We will re-design a replacement, and update the files.

Several people have expressed interest in alpha testing. I re-designed several parts of the machine this week, so that it fixed some of the annoyances of the machine, as well as make it more practical to scale up to full size. Most of the 3d printed parts have been replaced.

Anyone who would like to build one who does not have access to a 3d printer should contact me. I am happy to print out kits freely.

You will need at minimum a CNC or laser cutter. 

The machine is mostly self replicating.

Please feel free to join our Google group for builders. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/opengantry

Also feel free to email us openg...@googlegroups.com

Matt