Handibot Use - Tips, Tricks, Guides - Request and Share

As person somewhat new to CNC and Handibot I would love to have a place to learn from people who have more experience and have been using Handibot for a while on what tips tricks they could offer as well as for new users to request help on things they are having trouble with. I know from working in open source community that if you have a problem with something it is given that there are other people who had or having the same problem and many who have solved it and this opens an awesome channel for sharing this knowledge.

I can offer a few things that I have learned in a couple of weeks having handibot.

For me one of the easiest things to get started with and to receive immediate gratification from was V-carving some text. It seems to require quite a bit less effort in terms of set-up as you can just fire up V-carve load image and trace and/or use tools within V-carve to add text and shapes and create few cuts. I was able to print a piece on a day one and it looks gorgeous.

Here is my tip on that: If you need to do a quick run on the material as a test or want to see what a piece would look like on a finished piece of wood, you can get wood free flooring samples from Home Depot(Lowe's probably has them as well) which have few sizes and thicknesses but I like the ones that are 3.5 by 5 inches. They have them in oak, maple, straight and woven bamboo in various shades as well as some laminated composites. And they have a finish on top and look fabulous when carved. I really like bamboo, because it is strong. I was able to just mount them to sacrificial material using some double sided tape and carve them with 90 degree bit. But I also since have gotten a 30 degree bit that also works very well if you need some intricacy in your design. (Disclamer: I am not advocating abusing this in any way, so be sensible and use good judgement.)

It is also a good way to see how different materials carve. There are options for oak, maple, bamboo, and some other ones.

Another discovery of mine was 123d catch which does an awesome job capturing a 3d image from bunch of photos taken on the iphone. It works great as portable 3d scanner. However I found that I needed to rework some models and it seems sketchup was not able to handle the stl meshes generated by 123d catch very well, because I guess they are really complex. Another problem is that orientation of the model in the stl piece can be kind of messed up and needs to be updated because PartWorks seems to be a bit limited in that regard. Although I might have just have not figured out how to do it.

Blender to help. I found that Blender which is free and open source does a much better job at handling this type of models and I was able to clean up and re-orient models much easier to get them ready for partworks. You might need to get a couple of plugins for blender, such as the one that lets you import/export STL files. I am done with one model, but have not gotten a chance to printed as I had a bit of a problem with usb port on Handibot. However, kudos to handibot support they shipped a part to me overnight and I am waiting for it to come any time now so I can replace it. So I will try to give an update when it is done.

Again I am pretty new to CNC and ShopBot way of doing things although I am quite familiar with 3d modeling and few other things. I might be doing some dumb things here or doing them wrong. If se do let me know.

What I would love to do is get my self to the point where I can work with large materials, which brings us to indexing and tiles. So far I have not ventured into trying using tiles
but would love to soon and if you can offer some tips on how to do some manual indexing I would love to hear them. I know some people have large material jigs and I saw manual indexing mentioned with straight edge in the absence of a jig and I could figure it out.... However a practical tip or two from a pro could save some time and frustration.

So far I have not screwed Handibot into anything and I can see how I can easily do pass through indexing and have a plan to try a few things. I would love to hear or even better to see a practical guides on how I can print large material jig with my handibot. I guess I should just try and fail a few times, but I have been hesitating.

So here it is. I will add more questions later (I have many), but for now I am just creating a place to start this kind of discussion.

Would love to hear your thoughts, tips, tricks.

Hey Boris, stand by, I am working on putting a few things together...

INEXPENSIVE, REUSABLE TEST MATERIAL

Machinable wax seemed like a good idea..until I saw the price. After browsing the web, homemade machinable wax sounded like a possibility. After reading the recipes and recovery procedure of the machined waste, I was scared off by the severe burn danger of the learning curve.

My aim is an inexpensive, recoverable, machinable material to practice on. So far, I've toyed with frozen paraffin. My Handibot arrives next week. I'll see what happens.