Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Portable CNC: The Shaper Origin”.
Hey everyone tyler here with make, and today we are here at shaper – and i have joe with me here and uh we’re talking about the shaper origin. Now this is a device we’ve seen at a couple of different maker faires before and you guys are getting kind of close to getting ready to start selling the thing, but for anybody who’s not familiar yet what is shaper yeah uh well, shaper is the world’s first Handheld cnc machine, i think that’s the probably the easiest way to describe it, especially to uh people who are familiar with cnc, but uh yeah. Really it’s a it’s. You know we like to think of it like c and c. Without the bed size limitations of normal cnc, that’s the most striking thing about this, because if you’ve dealt with a cnc machine before you’re dealing with something that essentially is the size of the work, the biggest work piece you can work on.
But this is much smaller than that. Obviously, right yeah i mean this is a it’s a totally portable machine. I mean we, we actually have put them in backpacks and driven them on motorcycles to job sites and stuff like that, so completely portable. So what is what exactly is the machine doing uh? So the machine is uh. It’S powered by computer vision. We’Ve got a camera, that’s a front-facing camera! That’S looking down at the work piece! Uh people have probably seen the the shaper tape. This is a special fiducial marker tape that we’ve developed. It’S it’s low cost considered disposable.
You can cut right through it. Basically, you just slap down the tape on any workpiece that you’re cutting or any fixture or template that you’re creating and if you cut through it, it’s no big deal. You don’t have to be very careful about how you’re putting it down you don’t have. To put it in exact straight lines or parallel roads, or anything like that, you can just kind of put it down.
The important thing is that the camera is able to see a few of these markers at any given time. That’S how the machine knows where it is relative to the workpiece so kind of uh. In a nutshell, it’s like gps for power tools. The only thing the machine cares about is that it can see enough markers at any given time in order to make the cuts.
But you don’t really have to stress about putting it on at the beginning, because if you’re in the middle of the cut and if the machine doesn’t see enough markers to understand where it’s at you can it actually will tell you that it’ll say too few markers And you can actually go back in and you can add additional tape there we go. We’Ve uh laid out the tape, the next step, i’m in scan mode right now and i’m just i’m simply waving the machine over the work surface. I’M just capturing all this information and when i’m finished scanning i hit finish and what it’s doing right now is it’s stitching together all of these images, it’s very similar to how a panoramic photo works, stitching them together. Okay, the next step would be to actually place a file, so we’ll go in and we’re going to cut something look at a leg of a table.
I’M going to complete this one when i walk to the other side of the table, so i can start and stop wherever i want. I just went out of bounds and went out of the the cutting range. No big deal the cutter lifted up. I can come back to where i was and i can just drop back in and pick up where i left off there.
We have it got our uh workbench table leg, yeah, peel this stuff off easily and you’re done one of the things we’re really excited about. With origin is the ability to to kind of move out a plane or cut things cut features into material that you wouldn’t normally be able to do in kind of a flatbed, cnc, router or somewhere? So we’ve been doing a lot of experimentation with with various fixtures and ways to to hold material to actually be able to produce things like finger joints and dovetail joints. So, for example, we’ve um we’ve clamped up a piece of wood and we’ll demo this. You can simply come in and you can enter in the width. I’Ve already actually measured this just before inches and height, i’m actually going to kind of over specify the height. Just because it’s defining the path i’m going to be cutting – and i don’t know – let’s just choose to do four in there and create the joint, so you can see that it’s actually automatically generated equal, spacing uh four different fingers and pockets, and then we can go Ahead and just place that onto the piece that we already have fixtured up place, it lock it down, and now we zoom back out that is locked into place, digitally and then we can just move in and cut it.
So i’m going to start rolling now got some nice little features on the end grain all right. Well, that is a super impressive uh demonstration of shaper origin. Now we’ve been working with this unit here, but this unit here is actually the the one that you guys are going to be shipping sometime soon, yeah we are planning to ship and starting september 2017. uh it’s on pre-sale now yeah and what are the? What are the differences between these two machines? Yeah they’re, largely similar in performance, but this is uh.
This is representative of the shipping version of origin, so you can see some. This is some industrial design differences, we’ve kind of packaged everything together a little bit more compactly um. We still have the front-facing downward camera. We’Ve integrated some uh with effectively headlights so that uh in in low or differing lighting environments, we don’t uh. It helps us to be able to see our shaper tape better, we’ve integrated kind of nice. You know removable safety shield and really really importantly, we previously have been tethered to an external computer, and now the entire system is integrated in board, so we’re just going to have one cord going to the wall. So it’s much more like a regular power tool that you might be accustomed to all right. So shaper origin is available for pre-order today and where can people go to learn more of it? Shapertools.Com it’s available for pre-order. We are offering a limited quantity of them and the retail price is 20.99, but for for our early supporters and get in early enough, where you’ll be able to get one for less than 14.99. That’S that’s incredible, especially for a cnc machine that can break down material of just about any size you can throw on it.
That’S right exactly yeah great! Well! Thank you! So much for taking the time to show us the uh, the shaper origin today and be sure to check it out if you’re interested in learning more okay. Thank you. You .