Handle on my cleaver broke, so perfect opportunity to put this little router through its paces.
Finishing up the gCode parsing right now. Still need to make a little workflow for the holes, but I don’t think that’ll be too hard. I have something fun in mind 
Got fist and second contours working well (bottom and right of the handle). Now onto the rest.
Did a couple tests on MDF but for some reason the firmware is bugging out going from the drill operation to the contour operations. I’m sure it’s a silly line of code I’m overlooking. The holes look decent, but not amazing. As you can see in the picture, the drilled holes are little squished compared to the 3D printed mockup. The camera perspective makes it seem a little worse, but there is definitely something there.
I decided to do a little grid of drill operations to try to see where the error is coming from.
I plotted them on a piece of paper and drew lines through the dots to track the error. I’m honestly pretty impressed by how well they came out.
They all seem to be square and consistently in line, not drifting noticeably through the operation. After measuring the distance, though, it does seem that the vertical pattern is a little “squished” (188mm extent instead of 200mm, so about a 1% skew).
This seems to be consistent through all 5 vertical lines, though, so it makes me think that it’s just a calibration issue. I’ll try recalibrating it in the morning and see if that fixes it. Speaking of calibration, this whole grid plotting exercise is giving me ideas for an improved calibration process. More on that in the future, though…
Do you think different coloured surfaces, or surfaces with different reflective indices will affect the calibration?
My advice for that sort of thing is go bigger. Anytime I do any calibration, I go as big as I can between points.
Not that I’ve found yet. The most important thing is for there to be enough features on the surface. I could see a potential issue with reflective, shiny, or clear surfaces, but I haven’t tested on anything like that yet. For a really tricky material like clear acrylic, you could always just get around the problem by covering the surface with something opaque - either taping a piece of paper on it for the cut, or just leaving on the film that normally comes with it.
Heard. Super valid.
Recalibrated and we’re looking good now. That seemed to solve it. They must’ve gotten rustled up a bit in my luggage while coming back from the holidays.
Ok this video making stuff is kinda fun, I admit.
Got caught up with beta testing stuff, so I’ll be making a pt.2 to actually finish off the handle with a real hardwood.
