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Comment by mhb | Hacker News Reader

This is what it actually does: https://www.maslowcnc.com/about-maslow4

Aha, a plunge router attached to a Roomba j/k ;). That page is very helpful. Hard to say what it's good for unless you're a dedicated woodwork buff. Otherwise a jigsaw seems like enough for a lot of this.

There was a Roomba equivalent company out there, which would have wheels that drive the motor around, but they never shipped. Maslow moves itself by pulling on belts on fixed anchor points.

The Shaper Origin has you move the machine, and it makes corrections using machine vision to track its position. It will give you more accuracy than a Maslow; but at a much greater cost and more attention.

A jig saw does not make as clean cuts as a router, and you need to have the workpiece suspend so the blade can go through the work. With a router, you can just have a spoilboard underneath.

>The Shaper Origin has you move the machine, and it makes corrections using machine vision to track its position. It will give you more accuracy than a Maslow; but at a much greater cost and more attention.

I really don't understand the market for the shaper. Even the youtubers that get paid to shill them don't seem to have a compelling reason to be using them.

I've not bought an origin, but think it definitely has a niche. You can do almost everything you can do with a Shaper Origin with a regular router, but you'll need a template or jig to do it.

For example: - It can do dovetails, etc. instead of purchasing a Leigh jig and using a standard router. - You can do hinge mortises for various hardware. - Cutouts in hardwood floors for various registers, without having to make a template for just that thing.

When you get into curves instead of just straight lines it can be easier to work with the Shaper than a template/jig. You can also use the Shaper to build a template that a standard bearing guided bit will follow.

You can do all of that with another tool, but the Shaper origin does it with less setup. The trade-off is if you have the setup then a regular router is probably going to be much faster to batch things out.

Broadly the same market as the Festool Domino. The Domino doesn't do anything that you can't do with a dowel jig or a biscuit jointer, it's just does one thing quickly, accurately and well. The Shaper Origin isn't a replacement for a full-sheet CNC router with an ATC, but it is an excellent alternative to a plunge router and a stack of custom templates. Nobody needs one, but for someone who does high-end custom cabinetry and joinery, the Origin should give a good ROI.

Being able to cut complex shapes on site for art builds, where a designer knows Illustrator but nothing about tool paths, has paid for my Shaper Origin several times over already.

>where a designer knows Illustrator but nothing about tool paths

I guess that's probably the best use case, you've changed my mind.

Capabilities that would be most impressive with a jigsaw:

- 50mm of z-axis travel

- Cuts in the center of a 4x8’ sheet of material

- Repeatable cuts to a decent tolerance

- Cuts made while you sleep

> - Cuts made while you sleep

Can you leave the Maslow completely unattended? The video examples/timelapses I came across seems to always have a person removing sawdust (or something) every X minutes.

It’s pretty ill advised to leave any subtractive manufacturing machinery unattended

Commercial machine shops that run “lights off” typically will have continuous process monitoring, automated fire detection, automatic fire extinguishing, smoke containment and evacuation, and of course the correct permits and insurance coverage.

And, correct me if I'm wrong, they also have a person somewhere around and a big red button, right?

I work with one machine shop in Kent, WA that has a dozen Citizen L32 swiss machines in a row, turning out parts all night long. It will automatically stop with no notification for minor faults but stops and pages the on-call for major issues.

https://youtu.be/HLSerqr6WTs?si=xslBZNXjpDGTlfy5

> but stops and pages the on-call for major issues.

Just for curiosities sake, where are those on-call people located? At location, close to factory, home presumably?

Just local management, so I’d assume within a “reasonable” commuting distance. Note that in Seattle, a 2 hour peak-traffic commute might be only 20 minutes in the middle of the night.

Not if they're running lights-out, which is increasingly common in machining. A modern machine tool with all of the features mentioned above is designed to run unattended. It isn't uncommon for bar-feed lathes or mills with pallet pools to be actively running for >160hrs per week. If you're careful about your parameters and run the machine well within its capability, you rarely need to hit the big red button. Modern machines are smart enough to hit the big red button themselves when they really need to, and alert a human to the fact that something has interrupted production.

https://www.mscdirect.com/betterMRO/metalworking/definitive-...

Can we have a word about my butter sculpture?

Good point, probably ill-advised to sleep with it running!

I think it can do beveled and rounded edges plus do surface cuts* like for cabinent doors. And this will cut even edges, jigsaws are trickier for curves. *(likely wrong word)

Is this using any feedback mechanism on the position, or is it just feed-forward?

Anyway, I want a machine like this that can paint.

There's a little bit of feedback: Each belt has a rotary encoder to track position, and the motors apply positive torque rather than positive position. This is in contrast to how stepper motors work on a 3d printer, for example.

> Anyway, I want a machine like this that can paint.

https://youtu.be/osUTMnDFV30?si=wLUXKoyTDgfZELKu

Heh, nice, from the guy who also made a wacky hair cutting robot.

I think his approach can be improved if indeed he replaced the guiding rails by a system with corner-points only. That would make it more user-friendly.

I am confused. In some videos it is hanging vertically by two wires, but here it seems there are four wires and it works horizontally. Are people using both setups?

nearly vertical. It needs 12-15 degrees from vertical. Horizontal is fine.

There are 2 Maslow versions: V1 was hanging from 2 chains, and "4" is held from the 4 corners of the workspace, allowing it to be used both in the vertical and horizontal orientation.

V1 also had the electronics & motors on the frame, while V4 moved everything on the sled itself. This enables the option for the "frame" to be basically just 4 anchors on your garage floor, which makes this a very flexible machine.

In the about link (above), they do mention the frame:

"If you would like to build the frame shown in the video, that frame is 12' feet, by 2’ by 7’ tall."

Yes, they support either setup, vertical or horizontal

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