Welcome back! Here’s our September 2026 Production Update.

New careers page

We have a new careers page! Learn more about the company and check out latest openings here.

Bit giveaways are coming back

If you guys remember a few years ago, we used to just randomly give away bit and end mills and other random stuff. There was no entry, although we had a theme typically each week. We basically just wanted to give some little thank you’s to members of the community that were sharing their cool projects and knowledge to educate and inspire our community.

We did stop doing that for some time, mostly because we got really busy with other stuff. But I’m excited to announce that with our larger, growing team, we’re able to invest more time and effort into the little fun things I know we all enjoy.

Anyhow, feel free to share and engage with the community on CNC stuff! And maybe you’ll get some cool stuff in return!

Changes to our lead time tracking philosophy

To be frank here, we’ve made some of our customers unhappy with our wishy washy approach to our lead times. To those people, I’m sorry, we will do better.

To address this, we’ve made a few changes to our back end processes and to some effect, our customer facing communication as well. Here’s a few problems we’ve identified.

At the root, I feel like we’ve been wishy washy on lead times because we are worried about making promises we can’t keep, so we continued to broaden and pad our lead times to avoid disappointing people. But the reality is that imprecise processes lead to imprecise results. For example, when we listed our estimated lead times or shipping times, we typically tell people which month their item will ship.

But a month is a long time, and when it will ship is ambiguous. Will it ship at the start of the month? Will it ship at the end of the month? The customer doesn’t know. So what did we change?

• Rather than putting the estimated time to completion, we have an exact date for the completion.
• We will aim to ship by or before that date
• With an exact date, we will have an exact reference for when we need to inform customers if their order is expected to be delayed, so that we can be proactive on informing customers

We’ve rolled out this system over the last few weeks, and we’re getting things ironed out, but the team is working to adapt this.

Additionally, we’re moving away from month estimates, for example “item is expected to ship in September”, to a lead time defined by a number of weeks. Why did we switch?:

• As our production volumes scale up, we expect to build less in batches and more in a continual basis. In the past, we managed inventory in batches, so we would build, for example, 1000 machines at a time. However, this contributes to huge swings in inventory. For components that are smaller or less expensive, we could buy much more, while large or expensive items would be made in smaller batches. However, the quantity of parts we order each time is not limited to the size of the batch anymore
• We can start better scheduling production for each product on a week to week basis, according to what products are slated to reach their ship date. This means that rather than building an arbitrary number of machines, we have an actual minimum number we need to build each day or week
• We can keep track of our timeliness. We can see what percentage of machines we are actually shipping on time, and if we need to make any adjustments to our processes or production capacity accordingly.

We understand, especially as more and more of our customers are moving to building business around their machines, that timeliness is important. And so to reflect this understanding, we will continue to work on improving our processes and decrease lead times.

24 months ago, our average lead time for the AltMill 4×4 was around 17 weeks. Now machines are shipping on average in 0.7 weeks.

“Starter Kits” now available for AltMill 2×4, 4×4, and 4×8

https://sienci.com/product-category/altmill/starter-kits

We just posted starter kits available on our store for the AltMill line. As you guys may or may not know, we set up the LongMill Beginners Kits way back because we wanted to have a simple package for people to be able to order with basically everything you need to get started. Since then, at least according to Nathan, about 80% people get the beginners kit.

We also wanted to be able to pre-pack stuff because we can have stuff prepped in advance and have shorter lead times, so we also made the price slightly less than buying everything separately.

AltMill 4×8

It’s an exciting month as we’ve now received enough parts to build another 300 AltMill 4x8s! We have now started shipping out the remaining 4×8 machines that are in the queue.

Lead times are expected to be approximately 4 weeks after order. We expect lead times to start coming down as we continue pre-assembly for components.

ATC

Parts for the ATC arrived this past month and we are pushing out more ATCs each week. We’re expecting to ship around 32 units per week until we clear the queue.

For new orders at the time of writing, we are expecting another batch of 90 spindle parts to arrive Oct 10th, which means that any new orders placed now will start shipping in mid-Oct. Once the parts arrive, we expect to be building around 30 units per week. We are expecting another batch of parts for another 70 spindle units to come in November as well. Lead times will be adjusted based on sales demand, but we anticipate being able to build and pre-pack some ATCs so that we can keep lead times lower moving forward from there.

LongMill MK3

We have started assembly process for LongMill MK3 in August and have been working to prep for shipping this month. At the time of writing (Aug 25th), we should be getting the rest of our packaging materials tomorrow. Based on our current schedule and assembly times, we are expecting the first machines to start shipping mid-Sept.

I thought it would be interesting to look at price changes for the LongMill since 2019 when it first came out to today, with the first graph being the list price (USD), and the second graph adjusted for inflation. Although the price for the LongMill list price hasn’t changed too much, when you adjust for inflation, we actually got value cost back down to close to our first version.

What contributes to the change in pricing? Here are some reasons:

• Substantially higher production volume means more efficient production cost
• Improved quality. While the cost of producing precision parts has gone up, this also means that our other costs like replacements and customer service costs have gone down
• Engineering optimization, namely the electronics. Redesigned electronics has reduced cost by nearly 50% while being several magnitudes more powerful and reliable.

Additionally, the LongMill MK3 is around 3x more rigid and 2x faster than the LongMill MK1. I figured I would share this to contextualize the big leaps we’ve made in the industry.

Anyhow, in the grand scheme of things, things haven’t picked up in demand for the the new LongMill MK3 yet, and I think it’s mostly because the world hasn’t seen how amazing it is yet. And there’s a lot of stuff that people won’t really get to experience until they get their hand on it, so I’m really excited to be shipping these machines out soon!

AltMill Clear Cut Dust Shoe

Ok these have been a bit of a PITA, but I’m excited to share that we have a large batch of Clear Cut Dust Shoes coming in mid-Sept and are now up for sale.

We had a bunch of little issues with the dust shoe that kind of pushed the timelines for offering these up for general sale. First was that we had some quality issues with the molding where parts would come out weak or cracking. Another major issue was dealing with magnets coming out or not being installed correctly. We’ve since worked to resolve these issues and been pushing the manufacturing for these.

To ensure that we had enough dust shoes, we’ve mainly stuck to prioritizing selling the dust shoes with the spindles, as we mainly designed the dust shoes to work with our spindles, but we do want to make them available for everyone.

I’m happy to announce that we should be getting around 600 more units soon for individual orders in the next few weeks, and we’ll have another 3000 more coming in mid-Oct. Given that we sold out the 150 units in 2 days when we first launched these in Feb 2026, we anticipate we should move through these pretty quickly.

Ontario CSA compliant power supplies

We continue to work towards offering power supplies for AltMill users in Ontario, with the expected completion date in November. We’ve now completed the design phase and expect to start the certification and testing process this month. We have been working with Intertek in the design phase so we are confident that the certification will proceed in a timely manner.

Also side note, someone was asking about 220V compatibility. The LongMill MK3 will be both 110V and 220V compatible. The new certified power supplies are also dual voltage, but due to safety standards we can only certify one voltage at a time, but we’ll look into doing things for both.

An even bigger ATC?

Last year we foreshadowed the potential release of larger spindles by showing off the AltMill with a 4.5KW spindle. As you guys might know, with the AltMill’s rigidity, it can easily handle larger spindles. However we started off with 1.5KW and 2.2KW spindles as they are more accessible for most users.

If you wanna see the video of our testing from last year…

Well over the last couple months we’ve been playing around with a 4.5KW spindle, which works with the same type of electronics and system as our current 2.2KW ATC. This comes as a substantial potential option for increasing productivity for our pro-level and production level users.

We still have a lot of work scaling up production and getting our lead times down for the 2.2KW ATC, so that still continues to be our main focus, but figured I should share this as work comes together for the larger ATC.

SLB EXT V2 and SLB-LITE

The first batch of SLB-LITEs have arrived to our shop! We’re excited to start rolling this out into building the LongMill MK3s. We’ve successfully tested and flashed the first 350 units, which will go in to the first LongMill MK3 kits. Otherwise we are continuing to work on development for the SLB-EXT V2 used for AltMill.

New gControl?

gSender team and the engineering team as a whole have been absolutely cooking with the imminent shift towards on-board machine computing.

As we mentioned in previous updates, we want to build a new version of the gControl panel computer to make it substantially cheaper.

There have been a number of bonus improvements as we continue going down this path including:

• Improvements to UI, as we move towards a more touch-focused interface
• Improved process for connecting your phone to gSender (for controlling your machine remotely on your phone)
• And more…

Hey everyone, welcome back. Here’s August 2026 Production Update!

US/Canada Tariffs

A number of our American customers have been inquiring about the status of tariffs with the recent announcement by the U.S. government on potential tariffs being applied to Canadian products.

These tariffs are aimed to target three groups of products:

1. Alcoholic beverages
2. Dairy
3. Motor Vehicles

Based on our cross-reference of all of the HS codes that are expected to be affected, we have determined that the products we are selling to the U.S. are not part of that group of HS codes. This means that we do not expect tariffs to be applied to our products.

Because the tariff situation between the U.S. and Canada is still a little bit unpredictable, we can reassure that we will handle this in one of two ways for our US neighbours.

1. For orders that have been placed before the tariffs have been applied, we will absorb the cost of any tariffs (if there are any) and continue to ship our products as DDP. This means that any duties and tariffs will be billed directly to us and will not impact the customer.
2. If the tariffs create a situation where it is unsustainable or not possible for us to reasonably absorb the cost, then we will communicate this to the customer and either come to another arrangement or allow the customer to cancel their order completely.

We will make an update to our policies if the tariffs end up being implemented.

Based on our experience over the last few years, and due to our CUSMCA/USMCA certification, we do not expect there to be tariffs in the future. 

Customer Support Updates

We’ve been putting a lot of work into ramping up and improving our support process.

Our new support page is now live! A few updates to this:

• A more specific step by step process for completing tickets so that we can determine relevant vs irrelevant information
• Built in search function to suggest articles and information that may help with the issue
• Tracking to see which issues are the most common
• Tracking to see how often the issues that we suggest are correct in helping the user

We also have now revamped order status tracking in our website, which allows customers to better keep track of when they expect to have their items ship. You can now enter your order information and get a list of all of the items that you ordered. Soon, we’ll have the lead times tied to each of the products, so that you can get the estimated lead time for each of the products. This will also give us a better idea on our delivery timeliness success rate, as well as more easily identify orders if we are expecting them to be delayed, so that we can communicate with the customer better.

We’ve also had a lot of discussions with customers and our team in establishing better after sales support, with initiatives currently underplace to:

• Provide maintenance kits for lubrication and replacing wear items
• Parts available for spares and replacements
• Updates to machine use and maintenance resource pages
• More support videos

Lastly, it’s been mentioned to us about our warranty period for our machines. We are coordinating with the team to establish longer and improved warranty periods and support for our products.

For people wondering why our warranty is so short right now:

• First of all, we set up this warranty system years and years ago, and we didn’t really revise it because it wasn’t something that people were talking about that much.
• Overall, we haven’t had many issues with our warranty length because the issues are relatively rare. When we do need to send out replacements, we will typically do it for free or at minimal cost, even if the warranty period is over.
• Practically speaking, the most issues happen within the first 30 to 60 days of ownership. It’s very rare for customers to have issues after the fact, which means that even though our warranty period is pretty short, people don’t really use the warranty after the first setup.

However, I wanted to bring this up because this is something that a couple of potential customers have been asking about. And I guess if it’s not going to impact anything to provide a longer warranty and offer additional peace of mind, then why not consider it?

Here are some things that we’ve learned:

• The overall cost for us to provide replacements has been relatively low month over month. Based on my calculations, this is about 0.35% of the overall machine value on average.
• Even if this were to double, the potential uplift in sales that we’d want to see in providing the longer return period, it would only need to be covered by around two or three machine sales per month.
• Regardless of whether the customer needs to purchase a part or not, we provide the same level of service for the customers to troubleshoot and repair their machines. We expect the service we need to provide and the costs associated with it to be relatively the same.
• We also expect that it will make it a lot easier for our team to handle repair issues because we can just issue replacement parts without having to figure out the transaction process as well.

All of which to say, it seems like we can significantly increase the warranty period while saving some costs in some areas and also with minimal impact to our bottom line. We also believe that offering the additional warranty will provide better peace of mind to customers, so from my perspective it seems like a win-win situation.

In any case, we are working on setting this up and establishing our processes, and we will also increase warranty for customers that already exist retroactively.If customers have paid for replacement parts due to warranty service that happened outside of their warranty period, then we will work with the customers to either refund them or provide them credit appropriate to their situation.

Tool Length Sensor

We recently launched the TLS in the past month to great reception. After receiving customer feedback and getting through our first batch of production here’s some updates and changes to expect:

• Updates to the workflow in gSender
• Ability to fine tune fast and slow find settings
• Improved setup videos, instructions, and resources
• Improved and streamlined packaging

Improving our Supply Chain Process

Alongside customer service and care improvements and restructuring, we are also working on improvements and restructuring to our supply chain process, with the aim to reduce delays and allow us to react more quickly to changing demand for our products. Some initiatives put into place include:

• Automated monitoring of supply chain communication to tag and flag shipments
• New review process for Bill of Materials for products
• Tracking of supplier reliability and timeliness
• Reorganization of our physical space for increased storage capacity
• Cross departmental access to key reports to track supply and inventory

We are also slowly moving away from a batching system to a rolling inventory system. As our supply chain becomes more diverse, rather than building in big batches, each part will eventually be ordered as needed on an individual basis. This means that for parts like fasteners that are used in many different products, we can order them in larger quantities for multiple product lines.

You’ll likely see some changes in how we track our lead times from expected shipping month to number of weeks to ship. This gives us a more exact time when products will ship, rather than a vague date target. This will allow us to better keep track of our shipping ability and work with customers in the case of production delays.

We have also continued to grow our team on the supply chain and inventory side, with two new team members in the department and with a current search for an extra third member.

AltMill 4×8 Production

First, please note that you can check the status of your order and when it is expected to ship in the Order Status page.

AltMill 4×8 machines are expected to start shipping at the earliest on Aug 14 pending the arrival of additional rack and pinion hardware, but with assembly and processing time, most likely to start shipping between the end of August to first week of September. The remaining batch of machines in the queue are expected to clear out at the end of September. In the meantime, we are prepping parts and production to push machines out quickly once the parts arrive.

The current lead time for AltMill 4×8 is 10 weeks.

To prevent having long lead times in the future, we have about 300 machines on order for our second batch, and we expect to have about a years worth of inventory on hand. Could be less over time given that we tend to get a lot more orders as we decrease our lead times, but for now, we’ve made sure to pad our stock as much as we can.

Auto Tool Changer Production

ATCs are expected to resume shipping August 23rd, pending the arrival of a shipment of spindles around August 10. Once these spindles arrive, the remaining 58 orders in the queue will start shipping, with all current orders expected to be fulfilled by September 13.

The current lead time for ATCs is 8 weeks, so orders placed today are expected to ship early October. The lead time is due to the spindle being reviewed and modified.

Power Supply Certification

With some things going on with CSA-related certification to do, we’ve been working on designing, developing, and testing our own power supply designs for the next iteration of our machines. During this rework, we have put sales within Ontario for the LongMill MK2.5 and AltMill machines on pause until the rework is completed. Customers outside of Ontario are not affected, and LongMill MK3 will already come with Ontario compliant power supplies.

With the development of the SLB-EXT V2, we are revising the power handling and power shutoff mechanisms away from the controller, which better complies with Ontario safety standards. Although meeting these standards are not required in many other regions, we expect this work to overall improve safety for the machines and improve safety compliance in other markets in the long run.

Current work being done now include:

• Testing of power supplies in hot/cold conditions
• Power draw and handling
• Custom PCB design
• Fuse testing and trip behavior

We now have very few (if any) LongMill MK2.5 machines, and users in Ontario and the rest of the world should expect to receive their LongMill MK3 machines in September. Ontario customers waiting on AltMills should expect to see them return for sale in November this year.

LongMill MK3

A bit more work done with the LongMill MK3 in the past month, with our focuses mostly with

• Resource development and assembly manuals
• Packaging design and drop testing
• General machine testing

Many of the parts for the LongMill MK3 have now been received this month, and we are going through the setup for the assembly process.

We are expecting to start shipping LongMill MK3 in mid-September.

SLB-LITE and SLB-EXT V2

We are now reaching the final stages of SLB-LITE and SLB-EXT V2 development. Main work done for this month include:

• Design and planning for testing jigs
• Design and planning for firmware flashing
• Testing and updates to firmware

We are also expecting new packaging and initial batches of controllers to arrive soon in preparation for our first batch of LongMill MK3 machines.

Another busy June has come and gone. Welcome to our latest update!

Lead Times For Major Products

AltMill 2×4 and 4x4s are now shipping quickly, typically in 2 weeks or sooner. We have stockpiled some assemblies and full machines to help keep our lead times low.

Batch 2 of 4×8 machines are now in production, and we are expecting units to start shipping in August.

All spindle kits (minus the ATC) are now shipping within 2 weeks as well. We are now in production of Batch 2 of ATCs; new orders being placed now are expected to ship in August-September.

For orders that have already been placed, please refer to the estimate provided in the month/week that you ordered the product. Please note that the lead times that are presented on the product page only refer to orders placed at that time. Your order lead time will be different if you have already placed an order in a prior month.

LongMill MK2.5s are shipping within 1 week, and LongMill MK3s are also expected to start shipping in September.

For the latest list of shipping timelines, please check out our Order Status page.

Catching up on Maintenance Stuff

The last few months have been pretty busy with new product launches, but now that we’ve gotten through all of the big things, you should expect to see a bit of cleanup on our end, including:

• Updates and cleanup to resources and documentation
• Updates and cleanup for open source files and documentation
• Uploading of maintence and replacement parts on our store
• Continued training for our customer support team
• Continued improvement in gSender, our firmware and other parts of our ecosystem
• Development of ancillary technologies and products, like a CNC control pendant, sensorless homing motors and vacuum workholding

I don’t think I can list every single little detail, but users should expect to see small changes come down over the next few months.

Tool Length Sensor

Although we’ve mentioned this a few times in saying that gSender fully supports a tool length sensor, and users can/have installed a tool length sensor on machines with aftermarket TLS, we have now finally made the TLS sensor available to all users.

As you may know, the Auto Tool Changer system requires a TLS system, so we designed a TLS sensor specifically for our machines and systems.

Benefits of the Sienci Labs TLS:

• Greatly improves productivity for CNC projects that use multiple cutting tools by removing the need to manually re-zero each time the tool is changed
• Break-away magnetic interface prevents damage to tools or machine in the event of any errors during tool length probing
• Hardened 45HRC 4140PH probe disc ensures a durable tool probing surface and makes certain wear does not affect probing accuracy
• Optical sensor provides high accuracy and repeatability, unaffected by temperature like other sensors
• Flexible mounting allows the sensor to mount directly onto your AltMill or LongMill,  or other CNC other machines.*

The TLS is now available for purchase:

LongMill MK3

Last month we launched the LongMill MK3. We have continued to work on the production for the machine in anticipation of shipping in September this year. Most of our work has been in finalizing some of the mechanical design and pushing to production our fast turnaround parts.

Additionally, we have been finalizing our packaging design with plenty of destructive drop testing.

We also had a livestream to talk about LongMill MK3 engineering, design, philosophy, and more, so if you want to check that out, see below:

SLB-EXT V2 and SLB-LITE

We have continued to make progress in the second generation of SLB-EXT controllers. We have now received another 20 units of samples in early June for continued testing. Here’s some general work

• Continued work on the firmware configurator tool to allow for users to customize their firmware for their needs
• Minor fixes to board design and components (namely the fit and sizing of the power connector in this case)
• Testing of signal consistency and noise
• Real life testing and cutting with SLB-LITE
• Work on the expansion board for further functionality

Pricing Changes to gControl Panel Computer

Due to continuing instability in the cost of processors and memory, we are again increasing the price of the gControl panel computer. We are continuing to negotiate with our suppliers, but we expect that pricing will be updated for the following batch of units.

Pricing is expected to be updated as following: USD $529 / CAD $739. Please note that timing of the change and final pricing may vary over time.

As we’ve mentioned in prior updates, we do acknowledge that the cost of the computer is high, and so we are actively working on a longer term computing solution to bring the same or similar functionality at a lower price. This is not to say that the gControl panel computer is overpriced. In fact, for a industrial level, fanless panel computer, it’s quite inexpensive, but we do recognise that not all users need such an overkill piece of hardware.

Sensorless Homing

In a bid to reduce component count, reduce costs, and improve overall reliability, we are currently undergoing testing and development in sensorless homing technology in conjunction with our R&D with close-loop stepper motors.

Because of a closed loop motor’s inherent ability to detect when a motor loses steps, we can also use this feature to understand when a motor has reached the limit of its travel. In a traditional machine, a separate homing sensor or switch is used, which is triggered when the machine hits a limit. However in a sensorless homing setup the motor is used to detect the limit. A closed loop motor can do this because there is an encoder and electronics inside that compare the amount of rotation the controller has commanded it to turn versus the amount it actually turned. When there is a mismatch, the motor knows that it’s “lost steps”.

To make sensorless homing work, we need to tune and program the motor to improve the sensitivity of the motor, so that it can detect contact with the machine faster and more accurately. We can do this by varying the amount of power going to the motor, the speed, microstepping, touch off distance, filtering algorithms and more. Additionally, we need to consider the mechanical structure of the contact points.

While this is a bit of a tricky thing to get right, this technology has been proven to work very well in modern 3D printers, to the degree that most 3D printers rely on this technology alone for their homing sequence.

The advantages of sensorless homing is that we remove one of the potential weak points in the machine design, which is the homing sensor. While homing sensors are extremely reliable, due to the added complexity of installing them, the wiring, and the additional hardware, we believe that reducing component count can improve the overall reliability of the machine in the long run. Additionally, while the cost of the switches are fairly low, the cost reduction in removing the ancillary hardware, instructions for installing them, configuration, and more, we believe that we can see some decent cost savings overall.

Naturally, people are going to ask if their existing machines will be able to support sensorless homing. With some generations of motors, it is possible. However this does require re-flashing the motors and may require special tools. If your machine is working well with homing switches, it’s unlikely to be practical to move to a sensorless homing system and there is no practical performance differences when both systems are working well.

Vacuum Table Development

Over the last few months, especially coinciding with the AltMill 4×8, we’ve been working on a vacuum table solution in the background. As we continue to work on more advance systems focused on more professional level applications, we naturally looked to adding a vacuum table system to our machines.

Most of our work is currently exploratory, trying to understand:

• What sort of vacuum pump and architecture we should use
• How much performance we need and how much performance we can get in different configurations
• Potential shipping and logistics processes

Sienci Labs will be at IWF Atlanta

We will be at IWF Atlanta! We are working on the planning and logistics for coming down, but we’ll be bringing a few team members down to show case some of our cool products and chat with members of the community.

IWF Atlanta is one of, if not the largest woodworking fairs in the world.

If you’d like to attend, make sure to check out https://iwfatlanta.com

Show dates are Aug 25-28.

Hey everyone, welcome back to our June 2026 production update!

More Open Positions at Sienci Labs

We have a couple official positions now posted on Indeed as we continue to grow our team. With continual expansion plus the development and release of new products, we’re constantly looking for new people to join our team.

We also have a few positions likely to come online in the coming months as well, including people to join our engineering team for hardware and electronics, additional software developers to focus on gSender development, and an in-house CNC instructor.

If you want to reach out to us because you feel like you could be a good fit with our company, please feel free to submit through our general application form.

Changes to Website Coming Soon

Ever since our beginning, our development on our website has been shared between a few different people in the company, but we never had a dedicated web developer on the team. But now, with the recent addition to our team to work on our website, you can expect to see some updates and changes coming down the pipeline. Our main focus right now is improving the user experience on the customer service side through our Contact Us page, plus the Resources to make it easier to find information faster.

LongMill MK3

The LongMill MK3 has now launched! If you want to learn more about it, read our article.

In other news, we’ve been continuing to work on a few things this month, including:

• Continual design and testing of packaging
• Development of the SLB-LITE
• Machine testing
• Dust shoe design and testing

SLB-LITE and SLB-EXT V2

A lot of work done on the new generation of SLBs, including:

• New samples of the packaging
• Testing and development of key features, such as the RGB LED support, Ethernet communication and board expansion design
• Reliability testing with early prototypes
• Manufacturing of key components, such as the front and back plates of the controller enclosure

AltMill 4×8

As mentioned in our last update, we’re in the process of ordering another 300 machines for the new batch. Otherwise we’ve been continuing to do long term accelerated wear testing for the AltMill 4×8, essentially running the machine constantly back and forth 100,000 times at high speed and acceleration, with sudden stops and starts. For context, this is a super extreme condition and we expect no one to ever come close to running it at these conditions.

Here are some of the findings:

• Change in backlash is essentially non-existent, under 2 thou
• Motors heat up to 92C, which is close to the 90C limit that the gearbox can handle
• Besides the bearing retaining ring on the gearbox starting to come loose, all other components are still at the torque they need to be

Overall, this means:

• Under normal operating conditions, it’s unlikely for users to see any significant decline in performance or accuracy
• Motors only heat up to their limit at the most extreme conditions
• We can reduce the chance of the bearing retaining ring coming loose with adding some locktite during assembly. However, given that the machine was run at extreme conditions where the amount of vibration is significantly higher than normal operating conditions, we believe that this is not an issue. We will include in maintenance documentation for users to check the ring during regular maintenance. The good thing is also that when this item becomes loose, it is visually obvious, which makes it easy to address if needed.

Clear Cut Dust Shoe

When we first launched the Clear Cut Dust Shoe for the 80mm spindles, we didn’t anticipate how popular they would be. We had originally set aside around 100 dust shoes for individual sale, which were all sold within a few days. The remaining dust shoes have been set aside to include with the Spindle Kits for the LongMill and AltMill.

We are expecting some more dust shoes to come in in 2 weeks and another batch in August. We will announce very shortly when they will be available again for single purchase.

Spindle Lead Times

Spindle lead times have been long for the past few months, as we received more orders specifically for the 1.5KW spindles than we were expecting. We’re happy to announce that a new batch of spindles have come in and we are working through backlogs. Please check the orders status page for the latest lead times.

Some Interesting Proof of Concept Projects

If you’re interested in knowing what else we have going on, we have a few “proof-of-concept” projects that we worked on in the past month. These are projects that don’t have any commercial direction at the moment, but highlights our interest in pushing the technology further and could be things you may see in the future. We have a lot of different “proof-of-concepts” that we work on, but these were two that I thought were particularly cool.

Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning that when you buy stuff from us, a lot of that money goes back into R&D to develop products and updates that benefits the ecosystem as a whole, so remember that it’s not just an investment you’re making today, but it can impact what your machine and the machines of others can do in the future.

“Autofeedrate“

One of the challenging things with setting up a CNC for cuts is figuring out the speeds and feeds. With the implementation of “autofeedrate”, we can actively adjust the feedrate in real time based on the load on the spindle. In essence, we can take a current reading from the spindle cable and adjust the feedrate down to optimize the load on the spindle in relation to how much material it is cutting. This means that if there’s more cutting capacity that the machine can handle, it can automatically run faster. Or, and likely more important to the average user, reduce the feedrate before the spindle can stall.

In industry, this is a feature that is used to optimize feeds and speeds in manufacturing, where shaving seconds off the cycle time can result in significant cost savings in a production facility. However, the implementation of this technology can cost thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars.

The use of autofeedrate in a hobby level setting, on the other hand, would allow users to reduce the amount of guesswork required to set feeds and speeds on their machine, especially due to differences in material, machine, and tooling differences. In essence, one of the challenging parts of providing a streamlined experience in CNCing is the fact that there are so many variables to take into account. By having an active system in monitoring load and adjusting for these factors could help optimize cuts and reduce the knowledge needed to operate a machine.

The exciting part of this technology is that the hardware and sensors needed to implement this can be done on most existing machines and are fairly inexpensive ($20-50). The software and signal processing is the more complicated and expensive part.

gSender on CM4

Up until recent months, gSender has been a fairly processor-intensive program. With recent improvements to gSender, we’ve managed significant speed and reliability improvements. However, we mostly see and expect users to run the program on full scale computers and laptops.

Kevin (one of our senior software developers), has been working on a new proof of concept we are expecting to funnel into a wider development of a more affordable control panel to control grblHAL machines.

To be frank, a solution like the gControl Panel Computer, is expensive for the average hobby user. While we see a big chunk of AltMill users buy the gControl Panel Computer, very few use it with a LongMill. I suspect this has mostly to do with the market that we are serving with the LongMill since it is a lower cost machine.

So what is the gSender on CM4? CM4 is a compute module, or a single board computer. They are generally cheaper than full size computers ($30-100), and are designed more for embedded applications and for light computing. Oftentimes, a CM4 is used as a development platform for testing before going into a full integrated computer design, as they are easy to set up and can be purchased off the shelf.

Since something like the CM4 has much less processing power than something like the N150 Intel processor found in gControl. This means gSender for CM4 needs to be optimized for that level of processing without losing functionality. This proof of concept shows the screenc apture of an optimized version of gSender designed for CM4.

One of the key things to note is the redesign of the UI, which is made to be touch screen friendly and work on smaller screens. In the long term, we expect to implement this solution into a computer that can act as an affordable controller or pendant so that users don’t need to plug in a laptop or buy a gControl for their machine.