THE INVENTABLES WORKSHOP

We’d like to give you a quick update on the two issues we reported last time.
The new LED boards came in, and they work flawlessly. We’re really happy with the brightness and function.

We received the second set of Acrylic Door Panels to replace the ones that were initially broken in shipment. The vendor’s packaging improved but is still not 100% up to our satisfaction. 5 of the 30 panels arrived broken again, and there were issues with the size and finish. We are working with the supplier to find the root cause of these problems, and we will get a corrective action implemented as soon as possible.


The Inventables engineering team has been back and forth to our contract manufacturer a lot this past week, helping them get up to speed with the first Carvey pilot production build.
The process worked like this: Our engineer Bart worked alongside the manufacturing engineer to build a Carvey at the facility, discussing issues as they came up The manufacturers then spent the next few days tearing…

When I got into work this morning at about 8am I saw this stack of 12 X-Carves.  I knew it was going to be a good day, because part of our team had started an hour earlier and had already done this before I got my coffee.

During Maker Faire 2015 Inventables hosted a party Saturday night at Windy City Pizza.  We come visit the Bay Area from Chicago so we couldn't think of a better place to host a party!  It was close to Maker Faire and had some delicious pizza.  We invited everyone to come sit down, rest their legs, and have some great conversation with other folks in the community.  We were honored to have a number of special guests come out and join us for all the fun!  We'll get to that in a bit.
In addition to pizza, soda, and beer we also had a few demos on hand for people to get their hands on.  The first was our new X-Carve 3D Carving machine, next to it was the new X-Controller, and finally a bunch of cool samples that had been 3D carved.
The response to the party was amazing.  We packed the restaurant and overflowed into the patio of the place!

A while back we we did a blog post about a powerful TB6600 Stepper driver shield and asked you if we should “Carry it or Bury it”. We got a huge positive response, so we decided to move forward with the project.

We were concerned that the project relied heavily on a third party product.  We were not able to find a supplier with whom we were fully comfortable. Additionally, most of the driver boards were designed for use with a PC parallel port, had a lot of unneeded hardware, and had awkward form factors. Therefore, we decided to custom design our own.

Once we had complete control of the design, we created the ultimate Grbl based, high power 3d carving controller, the X-Controller. This is a complete, high power 3d carving motion control system in a strong, compact chassis.


Functional X-Controller in a 3d Printed and laser cut prototype housing.

A common issue we hear from our customers is that wiring is difficult- terminal blocks can wiggle loose, and soldering can be intimidating if you haven’t done it before. We struggled with how best to help our customers solve this problem, but then the golden solution appeared before our very eyes in a solder fume-induced vision:


Artist's depiction of solder fume-induced vision

In honor of Star Wars day, Youtube maker Warren Downes used his X-Carve to create chocolate molds of some classic icons. Amazing:



Check out more of Warren's awesome projects here.