Hackaday: Drawn along in the wake of the 3d printing/home shop revolution has been the accessibility of traditional subtractive CNC equipment, especially routers and mills. Speaking of, want a desktop mill? Try a Bantam Tools (née Othermachine) Desktop Milling Machine or a Carvey or a Carbide 3D Nomad. Tiny but many-axis general purpose mill? Maybe a Pocket NC. Router for the shop? Perhaps a Shapeoko, or an X-Carve, or a ShopBot, or a… you get the picture. The MatchSticks device is a CNC tool for the shop and it might be classified as a milling machine, but it doesn’t quite work the way a more traditional machine tool does. It computer controls the woodworker too.
2 comments:
As a huge fan of working by hand and doing as much as I can without the use of a computer, I am typically not the biggest fan of CNC machines. Don’t get me wrong, I really like what they can do and the clean and consistent complex objects you can create; however, I don't like that your job is often diminished to computer input and machine monitoring. I can appreciate this mini CNC device though. I think it's great that it functions more like any other power tool in that it's goal is to make harder things easier. Having a guide for the rest of the project also sounds particularly useful for people still learning, for whom things like joinery may still be particularly difficult. The MatchSticks device truly feels like a tool meant to help and much less like it's there to do the job for you.
It is hard to say whether I would purchase this device or not. The idea of being able to make complicated joints anywhere you are with the push of a button is pretty interesting given how difficult it can be to perform these tasks by hand. The only questions I would have is how much faster does this machine make the cut compared to other methods. Form a surface level it doesn’t seem like this machine is designed to increase your productivity but instead increase accuracy and repeatability. I also wonder where the real value in this machine is. The actual machine itself is cheap but the software is what allows the user to create the custom joinery on a given part.
I think I would be more interested in this system if it acted as an add on to a tabletop CNC and worked in parallel with the other cutting processes.
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