I am in the process of building a CNC design repository (think thingiverse for CNC content) for a college project. I am looking for people who are willing to throw some designs and glamour shots my way. I am still coding the site so there is plenty of time and when it is ready for launch I will drop it here as well as some other places. Currently, the site is aimed at general CNC operations at a hobbyist/semi-professional level. There are to be general tutorials on workflows and troubleshooting, the basics of the hardware/software, and of course the designs. All work needs to be credited to the appropriate authors.
The basic info I need for the design repo are as follows:
Title:
Author:
Description:
Special Instructions/Notes:
Some Post-Cut Images if available
And of course the design files.
If you would like to help out or have any concerns feel free to reply here and I’ll check back every once and a while.
that is definatly on my todo list. At the moment (and for the sake of my class) it is simply my designs on there but in the end when I take the site live it will feature a dashboard where the user will be able to set things like licenses and sources. I’m aiming to make this as legit and user-friendly as possible.
I’m pulling a lot of inspiration from thingiverse for the project since it has been an annoyance of mine that there isnt really any reliable sites for cnc files. Thingiverse is great but its really not hugely popular with the CNC crowd.
In the future I am looking at developing some utilites for the site as well (like the thingiverse customizer, netfabb, etc) but those tools will take some time to develop since there isnt anything really suited ive found yet. I’ve even been tossing around an easel/chilipeppr style interface for directly controlling a cnc from the site but that is long term plans for sure. i’m just a bored college student with too much knowledge and too much time on my hands
No one is going to upload unless they can easily licence there project. That should be very high on the list of todo’s.
We have talked about this in a few threads, cnc projects aren’t the same as 3D printer objects because of material thicknesses varying from store to store, country to country. A cnc project file if it has any joints will need to be parametric. I have 10+ years of CAD experience and I have not learned that kind of parametric design “software”. OpenSCAD is nothing like solidworks/fusion/onshape. For most people it severely limits the complexity of the design if it needs to be parametric. If it doesn’t have any joints it’s just an stl of dxf file.
Thingiverse has all the capabilities. I just think when people get to the point of running a mill they start learning basic CAD design and most projects are custom at that point. When you set up you CAM program you are almost designing in CAD so at that point it is very easy to make the jump.
I am not trying to discourage you I am trying to share my perspective. I share my parts on thingiverse so far and HAve help any time I need to publish a parametric design.
Ryan, I agree with you. Licenses are definatly on the todo list before the site goes live as its a point that needs to be in place. No worries on that front.
The project design is something I havent fully explored other than some basic 2.5d designs so your viewpoint is much more complete than mine. I have been mostly spitballing the idea and wondering what it would actually take. Mostly, this is a far off goal due to the nature of my inexperience with the design process in general.
That being said, I think with some solid categorization and explicit instructions within the files you can avoid a lot of pitfalls as a user like the joints you meantioned. But once again, i’m taking a guess as I have never encountered the issue. In the end I use thingiverse as an occassional source of quality files and largely as a source for inspiration for my own designs. In other words, the user’s mileage may vary
And on a side note, dont worry about discouraging me. Part of software development is coming up with answers to problems. The more I know the better I can solve the problem
