X-Carve CNC Router

Bloominglabs has an Inventables X-Carve 2015 750mm CNC router. This is a machine which can carve, cut, drill, and engrave flat sheets and pieces of wood, plastic, soft metals (like aluminum), and other materials.

Specifications

cut area of 750mm x 750mm
Z-axis range of 65mm
gshield with three 1.5A stepper drivers, PWM spindle control, and grbl firmware
300W 24V air-cooled spindle with ER11 collet
400W 24V power supply

Assembly and Maintenance Instructions

This is a pretty old model, so the relevant instructions seem to be a hybrid of 2015 and 750mm.

Software

Easel

Inventables's official software for the X-Carve is Easel, a cloud-based CAM program. An account is required. It starts with a 30-day free preview of "Easel Pro", which offers desirable features for a subscription price of $156 per year, and falls back to the more limited free tier.

Besides the price, I also found it more difficult than I was willing to deal with to configure the drivers, DNS, networking, and browser settings to get Easel to work at all. There's a very tall stack of software standing between the X-Carve's microcontroller, plugged in on a USB serial connection, up through the browser to the cloud, and it all has to work perfectly, and there are no error codes. With these problems in mind, it seems worthwhile to get alternative software working:

Alternatives

At this early stage, we haven't tried any of these yet, just collected this list of promising things to try:

Proprietary

F/LOSS

Machine Control

Universal G-Code Sender (works well, but is ugly)
~~LinuxCNC~~ (requires direct control of stepper motors)
Chilipeppr
CAMotics
bCNC
Candle (straighforward and pretty, but a massive CPU hog, especially when window is maximized)
grbl-overseer
Grbl4P (missing library org.apache.log4j, how do you install it in Processing?)

G-Code Generation

PyCAM (Development has slowed but not completely stopped. Lots of features, but doesn't look overwhelming.)
Aptos
~~BlenderCAM~~ (even the oldest supported version of Blender (2.83) is unusably slow on the available laptop)
CAMmill
HeeksCAD
~~gcodetools (Inkscape extension)~~ (abandoned since 2016, doesn't let you adjust the cutting depth)
FreeCAD's Path Workbench (Seems viable for sophisticated parts, but complex. Laptop has FreeCAD 0.19.1)
Solvespace's basic g-code export
KrabzCAM
Millcrum
dxf2gcode
dmap2gcode
gcodeplot

Both

GRBLWeb

Future Plans and Upgrades

Dust/Chip Collection

The previous owner 3D printed a mount for brushes and a vacuum cleaner. Completing this would allow the machine's waste to be captured and removed while it operates.

Water-Cooled VFD Spindle

The machine came with a very basic air-cooled brushed DC spindle. While adequate to start with, it is noisy, not very powerful, and offers poor control over its speed. Ebay is fat with inexpensive water-cooled VFD spindles that support ER11 collets, and only cost a couple hundred dollars. If the machine is used often, one of these would be a great upgrade. They are available in 0.8kW and 1.5kW models; 0.8kW would probably be plenty.

Polycarbonate Enclosure

The machine needs a permanent enclosure to keep sawdust from the woodshop out, and chips, noise, and broken tools inside. The best material for this would be 1/16" or 1/8" thick polycarbonate on a square-tube aluminum frame. Ideally, the enclosure would be tall enough to accommodate the water-cooled spindle mounted on the post-update Z-axis.

X-Carve Upgrade Kit Bundle

Inventables sells 2 upgrade kits for the X-Carve, and also a bundle that has both kits for a discounted price of $499.

Z-Axis Kit

The Z-axis upgrade kit costs $360 on its own. It:

stiffens the Z-axis (which reduces chatter, making clean cuts easier),
substantially increases the maximum Z-height (from 2.5" to 4.5"!),
increases the stepper motor torque by 50% (to 212 ounce-inches), and
adds better dust guards.

This kit does increase the height of the machine to 21.25", so affects the requirements for the enclosure.

9 mm Belt and Motor Kit

The 9mm belt and motor kit costs $190 on its own. It:

replaces the 6mm wide 2GT belts with stronger 9mm wide 3GT belts, and
replaces the X- and Y-axis stepper motors with ones that have 50% more torque (212 ounce-inches).

These replacements allow the X- and Y-axes to move with much greater force, enabling faster cutting speeds.

Unlike the Z-axis upgrade, this upgrade has very little impact on the overall dimensions of the machine. The replacement stepper motors are maybe 0.5" longer than the stock ones.

Z-Probe

A Z-probe makes it much easier to establish how much the tool sticks out of the spindle, which makes it much easier to consistently engrave 2D designs, or to precisely mill 3D parts. Inventables sells one for only $29, but it is designed for the X-Controller electronics, which is not what our X-Carve has, so it may require modification. (Our X-Carve has the older gShield electronics, with an Arduino Uno.) We could also make one ourselves, or buy one from somewhere else.