I hope aliexpress is better. I buy a lot of stuff from there like electronics components which aren't really sold locally anymore. Also tools and arduino related things...
Ackschually, you don't need to print them entirely sideways for structural integrity. Printing at an angle should also work and you don't get so many artifacts from support material.
Can confirm. So far I've gotten an external monitor, keyboard, mouse, docking station and a stand for it so it can be used as a laptop as well while traveling.
It certainly has issues but it's an impressive device.
I'm not particularly knowledgeable about IT but I avoid IoT like the plague. Everything should run locally and if I want to control it from away I'll use a VPN to home.
Nice to hear! At the moment the spindle, if it has the right to be called that, is a 775 motor with a chuck attached to it. Which is good enough for circuit boards and wood. Perhaps aluminium is doable as well as long as the feed rate is kept slow enough.
Should milling steel ever be on the table I'll make a larger machine and will use leadscrews on X and Y instead of belts and perhaps dual Z motors.
I've also designed the build around materials that were readily available such as the 18mm X rails. Apparently they're quite obscure since they aren't sold on typical Chinese webshops.
Thanks!
Indeed the Z axis rests on only one MGN9H block. For stability it can be changed to two sliders per rail. For circuit boards and wood it should be strong enough to handle the load.
As for github/launchpad, I never used those before for sharing anything. I will look into those.
Nice! Once you get the hang of it FreeCAD is quite pleasant to use in my experience. I've updated the OP with a gdrive link.
I've designed it partially by importing step files of commercial parts such as the stepper motors, aluminium extrusions etc. They can be found on sites like grabcad. You can just make a throwaway account there since you need to sign up to download anything. At least it's free...
I use a small hotplate at about 125 degrees and an aluminium baking tray. If you spread the beads out thinly it will dry pretty quickly.
Alternatively you can use an old microwave and that should remove moisture from the silica gel in a matter of minutes. You can easily overheat them though and I would never use that microwave for food again.
It's made of wood.