I’ve been talking about the CNC mill in the previous posts. Today I can show a useful result of my work. This is the faceplate for the Arduinome on the way. Actually it is the lower of two faceplates that will be sandwiched together. I’m making this from the Machine collective design as they seems to be out of business.

As I don’t do machine programming that well yet, the program was running very slow, this whole thing took about 4 hours to do. I thing I could do it in one if I tried again.

This time I’m back home and have some pictures. This is the project I’ve been working on the last two weeks. Actually most of the two weeks was waiting for parts. It took about four nights of soldering with all the LEDs. 64 RGB LEDs takes some time to bend and solder.

During the soldering I realized I needed a new side cutter. There have been a lot of pliers under the bridge all these years. But this time I bought a good quality side cutter that I hope will last for a long time. Totally worth it.

This is how  had to bend all the LEDs in order to solder them in to the Sparkfun breakout boards. The stack of four-by-four button boards finally done. I would not want to be the one soldering all boards for a 16 by 16 pad, that would be four times what I did here.

I had to think hard about how to connect the boards. Most people I have found online just solder the cables to the boards. As I will expand this to full RGB controll I wanted it to be possible to change cables later.

I really should get a good crimping pliers for this kind of things. I made all of these using needle-nose pliers and it was a pain.

There will be updates soon I hope. Next time it will be another recap of this spring, and I have a surprise project coming up. Stick around…

I thought I should tell you about the project that I have been working on. The one I need the faceplate for. But alas, I am at work and forgot to bring the pictures so it will have to wait. Right now I have slept for about 5 hours and it takes it toll.

I finally got the last parts for my secret project. Two days ago the circuit board from a friend in Germany arrived and yesterday the pin-headers and connectors I forgot to order the first time. Now I’ll go on building and hopefully be able to get this thing running. When I do I’ll have to concentrate on the mill to get the enclosure done. Good times 🙂

This is actually a old project that I need to make parts for a new project. I know I keep you hanging with hints of things I’m doing but not writing about. They will come as soon as they get to a state where I feel I can present them. Anyway, me and my friend have a office and in that office we have a small DIY cnc mill. It’s been standing still for almost a year as we didn’t get really good results from it. But now I need to make some faceplates for this other project and what would be better than to be able to make them myself.

Anyway, today I tore down the Z-axis and rebuild it. Before the motor almost stalled without any load. Now it is strong enough to hurt me, and so it did.