Would anyone of you want these upgrades I made?

Hey! I really desired a few quality-of-life improvements to my X-Carve so I designed and implemented them myself. It’s all designed, built and programmed by me.

These upgrades are mostly about one key thing: Being able to run complex work that require very high accuracy, but that also takes a really long time to complete, featuring tool changes and moving of the work-piece, and doing all this even though I can only run the machine for a short while every evening, since I have a life and a day-job.

The upgrades are these five things:

  1. My X-Carve has its own mini computer which is WiFi connected receives orders from the main workstation computer. It allows me to reboot the main workstation computer, without the X-Carve dropping what it is currently doing, and there’s no USB cable to trip over and accidentally disconnect.
  2. My X-Carve has a high-accuracy touch probe (0.04 mm repeatable accuracy) and several custom calibration routines which enable improved homing relative to the work piece. It removes the annoying process of trying to define the zero coordinate of your work piece manually. It also allows you to do multiple passes on a single work piece, even after you pick it up and place it back down again, since it finds its way back accurately.
  3. My X-Carve has a high-accuracy touch plate (0.06 mm repeatable accuracy) which allow me to automatically and reliably find the tool Z height after a tool change. Combined with the touch probe, I can do multiple passes on a single work piece, including switching tools and moving the work piece, without any off-alignment artifacts!
  4. My X-Carve has a generic pen holder, and the held implement can utilize the calibration plate to measure exact pen location. This enables it to label the surface it just carved with highly accurate markings of various kinds, on top of also making really neat multi-medium Christmas greeting cards. :slight_smile:
  5. My X-Carve has a custom g-code sender software which is really really really sweet. I call it the “Lenient X-Carve Controller”. I no longer have need for Easel or Universal Gcode Sender. I can’t really spread the software because it relies on three of the previous items (the WiFi device, the touch probe and the touch plate) to function.

These are the features of my “Lenient X-Carve Controller”:

  • PNG heightmap 3D interpretation (give it a PNG heightmap file and it gives you a 3D tool path)
  • SVG interpretation (basically the same stuff Easel does)
  • Seamless pause and resume, skipping, section skip, section repeat. So when you notice that the tool was messing up during 30 seconds in the middle of a 40-minute job, then you can pause, clean the tool, and just rewind and replay that specific section. No need to throw away the work piece, or to start the whole 40-minute job all over again.
  • Seamless real-time control of movement speed, spindle speed, maximum depth-cut per pass, safety height for rapid movements, and more. It allows you to adjust and tune all these things halfway through a running job session and they take effect immediately.
  • Silent mode, allowing you to start a long job, and then in the middle of it enable silent mode, so it runs with such slow speeds that its pretty much inaudible and you’re able to sleep in the next room, and can wake up the next day to find the work finished. (p.s. don’t fall asleep unless you got proper fire control. I have proper fire control)
  • Handling of huge time-consuming jobs, by splitting the work up into zones, doing one at a time. This allows you to see one section finished all the way to final surface finish, without having to wait for the entire work piece to first pass through the roughing stage. This enables you to quickly iterate your project, testing various materials, testing cutting tools for each pass, etc etc, before committing to a complete run of the whole thing.
  • Power-outage memory. It will resume a long job after a power outage, exactly where it left off.
  • Tool change routine (X-Carve moves to a convenient location for each manual tool change, beeps for you to notice, and then when you’re done it automatically recalibrates the tool Z height and resumes the next chapter of the work).
  • Joystick jogging (there’s a gamepad game controller next to the X-Carve, steering the joystick button causes the X-Carve to jog).

For me, these upgrades are the difference between my X-Carve being a chore, and being a true moneymaker. I’m thinking of creating a package of all these upgrades and selling it. So I’d like to gauge the interest.

So my question now is; Is there anyone interested in having these things?
If I sold this, would you buy it?

11 Likes

I’d like to see a video demonstration of all these features, it sounds like you have put a lot of effort into making this useful tool even more useful.

5 Likes

I’d love to it in action also. Very interested.

hello sounds interesting but the internet community buys through photos or videos and none are available there is hard to sell dreams and words?

2 Likes

I agree with you. Some of it sounds like “ocean front property in Arizona”!

1 Like

Any ideas on new controller I burnt mine up

I gotta get me one of these!

3 Likes

I might need to put an addition on if that were mine.:smiley::smiley::smiley:

1 Like

I second this!!

What’s the difference between touch probe and touch plate here?

1 Like

When Does it Go for Sale???

yes, depending on cost and validation of claimed functionality. Have you take this forward? Do ou have a video showing al the functionality claimed?

You have video and price

I would be very interested in some of your upgrades if you could get me some prices

I’d like to know more. I was working on a piece just yesterday that required milling on two surfaces so it had to be flipped and while planning that out I realized the limitations of not having an x y location readout relative to the frame.

I’m very interested let me know how I can receive it

Has anyone heard from this guy sense his posts of this? Lots of interest but no replies!

Still interested in

I mean the probing is hardly unique, and @PhillipLunsford had a good video on making a cheap 3-axis plate with some mdf and aluminum tape and not sure how he can make the machine “silent”. On my machine the spindle noise from the dewalt even not moving at all is audible across the House. Not like my prusa printer where stepper whine is the big problem. Plus dust control turning on with the m7.

We need a video!

Did anything ever happen with this? Anything for sale? Videos? Prices?