Over a long duration I finally constructed the Pocket NC enclosure. And now after an even longer period of time I am posting about it.

Features include:

• (reasonably) soft close/open with gas struts
• high visibility with clear perspex on four sides
• elevated mounting of Pocket NC to allow longer stock in the ER40 collet
• enclosure open signal integration with Pocket NC
• internal iPhone mount for video recording of CNC sessions 🤓
• integrated LED lighting
• lighting partially switches off when opening to avoid blinding the user 😎

Before getting serious with the Pocket NC V2-50CHK, I want to build an enclosure for it. Although there is one available to buy commercially, I wanted to build a custom one myself that has:

• more vertical clearance underneath the B axis so that I can use longer stock in the ER-40 collet
• excellent access to the machine when open
• excellent visibility of the machine when closed
• built-in LED lighting

The first chips have been produced on my new pride and joy, the Penta Machine’s Pocket NC V2-50CHK!

I’ve held onto the hard copy of my Electrical Engineering Thesis for around 25 years. It recently suffered water damage so I decided it was time to immortalise it on the world wide web.

I say ‘world wide web’ in preference to modern terminology such as ’net’, ‘web’ etc. in homage to the title of the thesis:

A TOASTER WITH A WORLD WIDE WEB INTERFACE.

Here is a photo of the ‘completed’ project:

More than 20 years ago, in the ‘dotcom’ era, I worked for the web design agency Razorfish and managed to get involved in a more exciting gig working for a hardware spin-off developing the Pogo Mobile.

I was responsible for the development of the embedded web browser that acted as the sole UI for the device.

I came across this printout of a screenshot I took when the browser rendering started to take shape.

Life is all about incremental steps forward. And… some steps backwards and sideways as well…

I switched from FreeCAD to Fusion 360 as I want to end up doing some 5 Axis CNC Machining. Currently FreeCAD support for this is very… far… away…

So here are the results of applying the same learning process of modelling a brick in Fusion 360:

And here is the online model: https://a360.co/3dLLBre

Presenting a set of template Rust, WASM and Deno projects on GitHub which make use of GitHub Actions and Workflows for continuous integration.

I’ve previously outlined my reasons for evaluating Rust and Deno. Using these technologies, I am looking to achieve:

• A scriptable high-level layer (Deno REPL) controlling a performant lower-level core (Rust).
• A single executable binary via Deno Compile.
• Cross platform executables via cross-compilation support for Deno and Rust.
• Ability to dynamically load and run additional logic after installation via Deno’s support for the Javascript import() function.
• Agnostic support for running as an OS process or in a browser runtime via Deno’s web platform APIs and the ability to compile Rust to WASM.
• Simple project scaffolding via Deno’s stated goal to “provide built-in tooling to improve developer experience”.

I wanted to see if these could all be achieved using free SaaS tooling for continuous integration including:

• code analysis
• automated dependency updates
• automated unit testing and integration/acceptance testing
• automated semantic releases
• automatically generated API documentation

I created the template projects and GitHub workflow and actions discussed here to see if the technologies could deliver on their promises and thus achieve my aims.

A new feature release version of Legify is available at:

https://github.com/vectronic/freecad-legify-macros/releases/tag/v0.4.0

This provides a new legify-technic-pin macro which renders a technic pin onto an existing Part Design workbench body.

Therefore the “s” in the name of the project “freecad-legify-macros” now has real meaning! 😜

I ordered some 3D prints of bricks designed with the legify macro code available at:

https://github.com/vectronic/freecad-legify-macros

Presented below are two assemblies as rendered within FreeCAD and assembled in real life.

A new feature release version of Legify is available at:

https://github.com/vectronic/freecad-legify-macros/releases/tag/v0.3.0

Beyond a number of measurement improvements, rendering of technic pins is now implemented.

I have just completed the finishing touches on Technic pin support:

I’ve been developing a FreeCAD macro for a while which uses the PartDesign workbench: https://github.com/vectronic/freecad-legify-macros

I’m just wrapping up support for rendering technic pins (work in progress screenshot below) and this effort has led me to a few more nuggets of information relating to PartDesign and Python scripting in FreeCAD.

I reached a milestone last weekend with a successful render of a brick assembly in FreeCAD.

Presented here is a somewhat terse step-by-step guide to installing a working version of FreeCAD 0.19 on macOS Big Sur using Conda.

Additional bonus steps explain how to use the new FreeCAD Extension Manager to install the Assembly4 Workbench and the Render Workbench (with rendering performed by Cycles).

If you use a 3DConnextion SpaceMouse I can report these steps will produce a build which supports it.

The plan for Flowscripter has always included the following goals:

• Use TypeScript.
• Use dynamic import of ES modules.
• Rely on existing module dependency directives to auto-install plugin dependencies i.e. not inventing a new module dependency framework.
• Providing Flowscripter as a single downloadable binary with no need for pre-installed dependencies e.g. Node.js, ffmpeg.
• Support native extensions written in Rust.