Did you miss our last Kickstarter?

Happy Wednesday Everyone,

This week has been rather busy and we have a bunch of exciting topics to cover.

Exciting Kickstarter News

First off, we are thrilled to announce that we are launching a 2nd Kickstarter campaign for Maslow4.1. This Kickstarter aims to get Maslow kits in the hands of everyone that missed our last Kickstarter and also provide an opportunity for all of our existing Maslow4 users to incorporate the upgrades into their machine.

If you have been following our project over the past 6 months you know that we are constantly working to improve Maslow4 with the help of our fantastic community. Thanks to your feedback we have been able to continue to improve the user experience through both hardware and software updates. 

With your help, we can order new molds for the updated mechanical parts and meet minimum order quantities to begin production of the 4.1. In the coming weeks we will post our kickstarter video to our youtube page with more details and then begin the campaign. We will email everyone on our waitlist when we go live! We couldn’t be more excited about all the progress that we’ve made and we’re excited for the future.

Firmware Update

This week we have been working to improve the accuracy of the calibration process. A discussion in the forums sparked prolific forums user @dlang to revisit how that process worked and he made several excellent suggestions.

@dlang pointed out that the calibration assumed that the angle of the belt was constant from the center of the anchor point to the center of the router, when in reality the arm and belt anchor remain horizontal (approximately) while the belt angles down. Updating the math to take this into account has relatively little impact in the center of the sheet, but can make a big difference when cutting close to one of the anchor points.

The second issue that @dlang found was that while we were correcting for the angle of the belt while cutting, we were not calling that function during the calibration process resulting in inaccurate calibration. This update fixes that oversight as well. 

We’ve JUST finished making these changes and we haven’t had a chance to fully test them so rather than doing a full release we’ve released it in the forums. Once we’ve fully tested the changes we can make a full release.

For now you can find the update here.

In our testing we are seeing an improvement, but it seems that there is still further room to improve. We’re especially seeing an improvement in the belt tension and the initial offsets when we apply tension, but when cutting test squares we aren’t seeing a huge change. More testing is needed to fully understand the changes, and as always your feedback is tremendously valuable.

Project of the Week

This week we have a few excellent projects to showcase!

@skoeb posted this beautiful coffee table he dubbed “The Bean”. It’s made of some lovely Baltic birch. He also posted the file if anyone wants to make their own.

@md8n posted his prototype for an Adirondack-type chair. This chair is special too because it’s made from plastic rescued from the ocean in Timor-Leste. @md8n describes working with this novel material in his post. It’s probably the first time a Maslow4 has cut something like this.

@tryon is busy prepping signs for Football season out of MDF and they are looking good! In their post they explain their painting process too, in case you want to try something similar.

That’s all we have for today. Have a good week and Happy Halloween!

-Bar and Anna