First of all you’ll need a CNC machine. I got mine from Inventables<\/a> and upgraded it with a Kress 800 FME spindle<\/a> (the ShapeOko forum has some nice posts on the bigger Kress 1050 spindle<\/a>). I posted some posts about building my ShapeOko 2<\/a> (here’s another one<\/a>). I’m very pleased with the performance of my new spindle. The stock spindle (the Dremel <\/a>clone) wasn’t strong enough for continuous work in my opinion.<\/p>\n Then there is software: there is a lot of free and open source software out there for the purpose of drawing, generate g-code and sending the g-code to the ShapeOko 2. I find the following combination of software useful:<\/p>\n OpenSCAD<\/a>: An open source CAD program. It doesn’t have a lot of fancy drag and drop features but it is solid and gets the job done. There is a lot of documentation and tutorials on the homepage for the beginner so don’t be scared by the programmatic approach (which suits a mathematician and programmer like me very well \ud83d\ude42 ).<\/p>\n Inkscape<\/a>: Another open source program for drawing SVG files which sometimes are handy when creating simple tasks for the ShapeOko 2. Again the homepage contains a lot of useful information for the beginner: tutorials, videos, blogs and a strong community.<\/p>\n MakerCAM<\/a>: An on-line g-code generator. It’s simple to use and I use it for simple tasks. A good tutorial on how to use Makercam can be seen here<\/a> and some more useful information can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n FreeMILL<\/a>: A free program from MecSoft<\/a> (thank you for making this excellent program free \ud83d\ude42 ). If you get fascinated by making things on a CNC machine (like me) then you should consider some of their non-free products (no, I don’t get paid for writing this!).<\/p>\n Grbl Controller<\/a>: A open source g-code sender for communicating with the CNC machine. There is also a tutorial on how to run Grbl Controller<\/a> on a Raspberry Pi<\/a>. A list of g-code senders can be seen here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Last but not least: I needed a small utility for breaking down the g-code generated by FreeMILL so I made one (I will make it available for download later on). The thing is that FreeMILL generates g-code describing the surface of a solid (imported as STL) which often isn’t possible for the ShapeOko 2 to run directly because the cuts are simply too deep for the machine to handle in one run. Therefore, I created a small tool to break down the file from FreeMILL so it can be milled a few millimeters at a time. I’ll write more about it, when we reach that part. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n At the end of this tutorial we’ll have created something like this:<\/p>\n I’ll take you through the process step by step and tell you about my experiences with the ShapeOko 2 along the road (Murphy<\/a> has been a very frequent but uninvited guest in my workshop since I got my ShapeOko 2!). \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n![\"Dominion](\"http:\/\/www.henningandersen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/DominionTurntable-300x149.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n