Beginners guide to Easel - Episode 2

ready to learn some more skills in easel then stick around because that's what we're doing in this episode [Music] hey everyone and welcome to another episode of james dean designs if you're not already subscribed hit the link in the corner to get all the latest videos now a few weeks ago i put out a video for a beginner's guide to easel and we went through some of the tools and features how to set up a project and output a very basic sign to our cnc machines now today's episode is a step on from that we're still sticking with easel and we're going to be looking at some other features and tools within that software in order to do another project also some issues that may arise when you're doing your own projects and ways to work around them now just to recap we are looking at easel not easel pro easel is the free version pros the paid for version with some extra features if you've got any queries around software check out the link in the corner to the recent software video i did which clears up a lot of the questions around them now for today's project i try to do things that i either know people can sell on personalize for families and friends or something that can be a bit fun so what we're going to do today is create a handheld game more specifically a handheld maze that we can play about with and have a bit of fun so let's get started so we're beginning today's episode by looking at the setup rather than jumping straight into the software and there's a reason for this some of this is going to define decisions we're about to make within easel now the first thing that i will flag is obviously we're using the 3018 pro for today's episode so that's going to dictate the feeds and speeds we'll be setting later on the next thing i should point out is that towards the back here we've got this green paint and the wood's quite rough here and it also slopes off so kind of this isn't really good for us to work with if i bring the square in as well and set it against this bottom edge we can see just how much this right hand side is off so again it's not very square for us to work with so what we're going to be doing today is really focusing on the middle of this piece of wood as our center piece to be able to make something today now the next thing i'll point out is this whole piece of material is held down with blue tape and ca glue an alternative method is using clamps around the outside now as i just mentioned we'll be focusing on cutting out a middle piece from this wood if you're using clamps and you cut out a middle piece as you get towards the lighter passes you run the risk of that middle piece coming loose we're going to look at something called tabs in easel which is a way to stop that coming loose as you're cutting now because we're just using the middle piece of this i've measured it out and it's approximately 200 millimeters wide by 140 millimeters deep the thickness of the material itself this piece of oak is just over 20 millimeters now we will be doing multiple passes in today's episode so if you haven't got one already build a zed pro buy the zed probe and definitely check out check out the link in the corner in how to do that and get everything set up correctly now let's move over to easel and start to learn some new features there so i mentioned about the previous beginner's guide episode now any features that are covered in detail in that video i will skim over in this video to save bogging it down with things that we've already covered the purpose of this video is to look at some new features that we haven't previously played about with so we're going to start by clicking new project and the first thing we want to do is set the size of the piece of wood that we took a look at so we're going to come up here and click on width and then change that to 200 millimeters wide by 140 millimeters now the depth of the piece of wood is 20.5 millimeters i'm going to set this to 20.8 i always like to set it a little bit deeper to guarantee that whenever we do a full cut it goes through to the bottom so 20.8 millimeters then we'll come back over to our design area now we can see the visualization has updated that automatically so now i pointed out on the piece of oak that some of the edges were a bit rough or not quite square and this is also going to be a handheld piece so we want a nice clean edge all around it so the first thing we're going to do is draw a border within this that will be cut out and that essentially will then define our work area going forward so i'm going to begin by coming up to the square tool inserting that and i want to get it close to the edge but not too close so there's a little bit of a border and then just stretch it out to fill that space so it's fairly even gap all the way around so once i've done that that is fairly even now now we can see on the visualization that this is doing this as a pocket it's taking out all of the middle we only want this to be a profile cut which is just a singular cut going around the outside leaving the middle alone so we're going to come over to the cut tab and we're going to set this straight away to the maximum depth so we'll drag that down to 20.8 we'll see that's just taken all the middle out there but the difference is we want to take this from a pocket cut to a path cut and i'm going to do this on the path line itself so now if i move this visualization around we can see that the cut is going all the way through but just doing it as a singular outline path now as we as we went to the full depth on this you will have noticed this extra menu come up there in the bottom and these yellow marks appeared on the design area these are tabs they are essentially for keeping your your material secure when you cut through it now because we're holding the material down with glue and tape today across the middle it's less relevant but if you're doing this and you're just using something like clamps what would essentially happen is that you're machining this outer border out once it gets to the last cut this middle piece will start to become loose it may ruin your job it may break it may even damage the spindle itself if there is too much force so what the tabs do the little pieces of material left in that help keep that piece of material in the center in place and secured you can adjust some of these you can adjust the length the depth of them and the amount of them if it's something simple like a square or a rectangle four or six may do and as we adjust this we'll see that it updates live going around the cutting profile now as i've already mentioned we have secured everything down with blue tape and glue today so this is not needed so i'm going to turn these off the other thing as well as this is a handheld maze i want to just soften up these corners i don't want it to be too blunt so i'm going to come back to shape and just put a five mil radius on those corners and as you see it just rounds them off nicely now let's move on to creating the maze now you could use the shapes and tools that are already inbuilt in in here to start to draw out your maze using lots of different rectangles placed all over and just in different configurations rotating them around i'm doing this very very quickly but you can start to see the idea where you're creating this maze run within the material itself now fortunately easel has an inbuilt maze generator so i'm going to delete these out of the way and then we're going to come over to the apps library as i've mentioned previously there are lots of useful tools in here that are like plugins to the piece of software do take a look at them because yeah you can really have some fun with the bits in here we're going to come back up and focus on the maze generator itself now it gives us an idea of what's going on and some instructions for these settings down here now unfortunately they are all in inches so if you're used to working in millimeters you will have to do some conversions now the first thing it says is the wall thickness should be one and a half times the width of your marble in our case we're going to be using a three millimeter ball bearing so three millimeters converted into inches and then multiplied by one and a half i believe is about 0.207 inches so i'm going to type that in enter that now when we get down to the columns and the rows you'll see here that this is essentially built up of a grid there's lots of columns and there's lots of rows and certain places are just converted to grey in order to make that the path of the maze so in essence this is how complicated you want the maze to be so if we drag these right up and drag this at one in comparison you'll see the maze gets very complex now i don't want to key i don't want it to be too complex so i'm going to bring this back down to about 20 and 20 for the rows as well and now we've got a bit of a bit of maze going on but it's not going to be too complicated for the end user the final option called the seed now this is basically the generation of the map itself and how difficult it is to get from the start to finish as you slide this up and down it will generate different orders of the way this maze appears now if we look we've got the start and the stop included which is this top right and the bottom left it doesn't matter which one is the start and stop at the end of the day it's just this is the entry point and the exit point for the maze and as we slide this about you'll see it generates different layouts some will be more complex than others some will be fairly easy so i'll try and find an easy one just to explain it perfect now as you can see the entrance to the maze literally comes straight down across up and over and you're back out so from a user's point of view that is going to be really simple to complete this task now i'm looking for something a little bit more complex than that so i'm just going to slide this up and down until i find a configuration that i'm happy with there we are so it's going to take a bit of work for the user to get from start to finish so they're gonna have to come all the way down double up back over this section all the way over to the right and then down back across up and over and work their way to the finish so it is going to be a bit of a challenge we will be adding some more obstacles on the way and i'll talk about that shortly but now i'm going to click import now it's imported at the size that it is based on the ratio of the ball bearing and that wall thickness that we set now i just mentioned i'm going to be adding some more obstacles into this maze so i want to leave these channels as wide as possible rather than the set ratio from the maze itself so i'm going to enlarge this up slightly but i also want to leave a border around this edge itself because i don't want to get in too close to the edge of the profile cut otherwise it may mean that some of the edges break off as we start to machine it so i'm just going to try and get these little tabs on the top right and the bottom left close but not quite touching that outer profile and then a similar width on this left hand side so we'll slide it over a little bit now if we look on the visualization we can see this start and the end point but they're not open in order for us to slide that ball bearing in or for it to fall out on the finish so what we're going to do is i'll zoom in on the visualization slightly so you can see this update and we're also going to zoom in on the design area so if i zoom in and move this about now what we want to do is extend these little feet out into this profile cut area so i'm going to click on the maze and i'm going to click edit points and you'll see lots of dots appear for all the points or nodes that you can edit on this shape so you just literally have to click on them and you can drag them and manipulate them as you need to i'll undo that for now we're going to try and drag these little two feet into this black area that's being cut out so i'm just going to click on one drag it in slightly and click on the other one and drag that slit down slightly now you'll start to see the red lines appear around that arrow that just means that you're keeping everything at a 90 degree angle in relation to something around it so we know that is all still parallel and square in the way it was originally now if we come over to the visualization we can see this has also been updated and the entrance or exit is now there now there's a bit of tab left over and there's a bit of a conflict going on in the cut i'll come back to this shortly but first we're going to go up to that top right and edit that one as well so i will move the visualization around so you can see this as well and we'll drag that point and go up a little bit and we'll drag the one next to it and go up as well and again we can see it is now cutting into that outer profile however this little tab that we have going on here where it's not quite cutting all the way through this is a bit of a conflict within easel now the cutting order within easel is defined by the order that you draw things in so for example because we drew the outer border first it thinks that what is what needs to be cut first and then when we drew the maze on top that is a different depth so it thinks there's a bit of a conflict going on now for safety it's taking it that the depth of the maze is the correct depth not the outer edge so the easiest way to do this is to reorder the layers within this file now you have to imagine although everything looks flat they are essentially stacked up on top of each other and if we reorder that stack it will change the cutting order so i want to right click on the maze and go send to back now as you can see it's changed the order and that they outside profile now is more predominant than the maze in the middle which is exactly what we want now i just said about making this a little bit more complex for the user when playing with the maze so let's add in some obstacles to make it a bit more challenging i'm going to zoom in slightly the first thing i want to do is put a little a few holes along the channels so the ball may fall out and stop them from completing it you could do this by inserting a circle and making this a full cut through hole so if we really shrink this down so it fits within the channel i'll bring it up to this top right hand corner so we can see it on the visualization and then if we take the cut depth all the way down you'll see it puts a clean hole all the way through this the problem is when using the circle tool to create holes it can actually be quite a long process because essentially what the machine does it will take your depth per pass so for ease let's call it half a millimeter it will machine half a millimeter out retract the head all the way up to the safety height all the way back down another half a millimeter back out back down another half millimeter and so on so to actually cut a hole this method all the way through does take quite a long time now the bit that we're using today is a 1 8 bit which is a 3.175 millimeter now the ball bearing that we're using is a three millimeter so a hole the exact size of the bit that we're using should be perfect so rather than using the circles we'll delete that out we're going to use the drill feature now i've clicked on that and it's inserted a hole straight away if i come bring it back up to this top right hand corner you can see there that it's punched a hole straight through the material and this is the same diameter as the bit we're going to use now the advantage of using the drill feature for a hole is it will do it much faster and much more efficiently because it doesn't keep retracting up to the safety height so therefore it will just make the job a little bit quicker so what i'm going to use these holes is to try and force the user to roll the ball bearing down a channel that they don't need to go down undo that right we're going to drag this drill bit hole down to here and what i'm trying to do is force them into this channel that's the dead end i'll reposition the visualization so we can see what we're doing so i want to try and get one hole towards this bottom edge and then two holes slightly above it on either side to make it a little bit of a slalom so i'm going to zoom in on this a little bit more so we can be more accurate with the positioning i'll drag this down and keep it as close to the edge as possible without actually touching the edge and try and keep it central to the channel above it now when i press control c control v which is edit and copy you can also do that from the menu up here and it gives us another one exactly the same now we're going to position this to the side of it but slightly higher and again touching and close to that top wall now i'm going to paste another one in and again put that on the opposite side to create that slalom that we was just talking about now if i rotate this around a little bit what we can start to see is we've got that slalom going on but it's going to be pretty tight to get the ball bearing around that gap without it slipping into this um extra trench here that is no use to us so again just making the user's life a little bit more difficult when they're playing the maze i'm going to zoom out i think what i'll do with that is create multiples of those around the course itself so we're going to select all three so we're going to copy and paste them again ctrl c ctrl v and we've got another set let's move this to somewhere else in the course that gives them a similar problem such as this little bit down here on the bottom right i will reposition this and zoom in a bit more so it can be accurate again i'm just going to do this let's get as close as i can aside without touching the edges of the walls themselves there i'm pretty happy with that i'll move the visualization around again so you can see what we've just done there we are so for a similar scenario in where we've got this little slalom in order for the user to get around i'll just reproduce that again a couple of times around the course but i'll speed this up so you don't have to go through every stage so there we have it we have a few horizontal ones and i've also put a vertical one on this far left hand side let's add something else i hear about something with a bit of texture so it's a bit like bumps in the track again almost to make the ball bearing skip and make their lives a bit more difficult so i'm going to come up to this area here where the cursor is just zoom in a bit and reposition and we're going to add some squares at different depths as i say to make it a bit of a texture so i've just inserted the square we're going to shrink this down to roughly the same width as the mase itself and again i'll just reposition the visualization so we can see what we're doing as we can see that it's causing that bit to be a bit higher than the rest of the maze that's because it's at a different depth now that's at 8.3 i'm actually going to reduce the depth of the maze itself it's 10.4 millimeters the ball bearing itself is only three millimeters so we can probably get away with making the depth of the maze at about six millimeters this also means it should cut a lot faster because we're not machining as much detail out now what we can see is that square is actually inserting the visualization so we're going to come back over to that now the depth of the maze is six millimeters so i want to make this 6.8 millimeters so there's a little bit of depth there but it's just going to make it a bit more difficult journey for the ball bearing to roll over so i'm happy with that we're going to control v copy and paste it and just put a couple of them in a line as say just making it more difficult for the user put one below it and also one above it now just to make sure these are sitting central in the maze we can select them all align them on the vertical middle position and that's just brought them all in centrally and it's now sitting within that channel of the maze itself now similar what i did with the holes i'm going to zoom out i'm going to replicate this a few times one two three to highlight them i've also right clicked and i'm going to come down to combine to make these a group again making our life easier to reposition them ctrl c ctrl v and let's scatter some of these around the maze itself so there we have it we've got a few obstacles now on the maze to make things a bit more difficult for the user and it's all reflected from the design onto the visualization so we can just see the extra texture that i've added in places to make it a bit of a rougher journey through the maze now let's take a look at this blank space that we have over here if we were making this as a gif for someone it'd be an ideal place to put a bit of text in so that's exactly what we're going to do for now i'm just going to type the word maze we're going to rotate that around 90 degrees and just get it roughly in position over here i'm going to drag this across slightly so i can see the full area now i want to enlarge this so it's filling the space but still leaving that little bit of gap around the edge so it's not click too close to the border itself and risk ruining any of the wood on a breakout so we'll enlarge it a little bit i'll reposition the visualization so we can see what we're doing and i also want to check the depth of this i don't want to make it too deep again to save having a long machine run so i'm going to bring that down to about six millimeters again the same as the rest of the maze now i want to indicate to the user where the start of the maze is so i'm just going to bring the text tool in again use the same font type start rotate it 90 degrees again and we want to try and shrink it down to be in that top right hand corner it will do so and i also want to put a little arrow next to it just to indicate where you should be beginning so we're going to come up use the triangle tool insert that quickly again rotate it 90 degrees bring it up to this little gap and shrink it down until it fits the space i also want to check both the depth on those again not make them too deep so i'm going to bring this down to about four millimeters this time now what we can see on the visualization is there is a lot of blobs here because the one point the 1 8 bit is too large to do the detail within that text itself so we're going to try and resolve that but the problem is when we add a secondary bit into this it's going to treat the way it does the drill holes and the outside profile a little bit differently now i'm warning you up front when i'm saying this so you can actually see what changes on the visualize visualization itself so zoomed out pay attention to the drill holes and the width of this outside border when we add a secondary bit in so i'm going to come up and i'm going to select a 1 16th bit come back out now what we can see straight away is it's filled in the missing detail within this start word but it's also made this outside profile much thinner and it's also made the holes much thinner as well it's given a bit more detail to the maze it's giving them sharper corners but it's changed the cutting parameters of our outside profile and the holes which is not something we wanted now this is a downside to easel is that you can't always select on certain shapes what the cutting bit is it defines the whole job as one piece however there are ways around this and we'll take a look at that now actually before moving on and solving that let's set our cut settings because it will make our life easier before we separate this out into different designs so we're going to come up to cut settings and we're going to switch to manual now as you know i like to be conservative with my cuts i would rather it go slow and finish the job than go too fast and run the risk of ruining it now this is also oak so we're going to take it fairly slow we're going to do 450 millimeters per minute plunge rate of 2 to 0 and a depth per pass of 0.5 millimeters i'm using the 2000k spindle so i'm going to leave that at 2000 essentially telling it to run at maximum speed now on the 1 16th bit i'm just going to bring that down to 450 millimeters again 220 on the plunge but i'm gonna make the depth per pass at about 0.4 again just for safety because it is quite a thin bit and i don't want to run the risk of breaking it again we'll leave it at 20 000. so we know all of our speeds and feeds are set now now the problem i just spoke about with it treating certain cut paths not how we want them but how easily is interpreting it one way around is to separate this design out into different sections now to some degree we are making this more difficult because we're adding another cut path to it but we are getting exactly what we want and it is a way of working around easel's limited features so we're going to come down to this bottom blue area we're going to click on the drop down arrow and we're going to click duplicate now this has just literally replicated the design that we have and what we're aiming to do well i'm going to keep all the detail on this left hand side but all the bits that we definitely know need to be cut out by the 1 16 bit we're going to keep on the right hand design so we'll come over to the left hand design first and we're going to delete off everything that we don't need such as the outside profile and all of these drill holes because we know they're coming out too small now equally on the right hand design we're going to delete out all of the stuff that we have left in place on the first design so we're going to delete out the maze itself we're going to delete out the word maze and all the other bits other than the outside profile and the drill holes and what we're also going to do on this design now is get rid of the detail bit and just leave the 1 8 bit in place now as we updated that we can see this profile cut back went back to the width it should be the same as the drill holes now arguably you could do the profile cut with the thinner bits but i'm always concerned that with how thin those bits are going at depths this deep it's a bit of a risk so i always like to make sure i'm doing a profile cut with a decent thickness bit such as a 1 8. now the only downside to doing this is once you separate the design out you can no longer see what they look like together so it's one or the other and that is exactly why we did all the designing up front and then separated everything out later so we know everything is now designed we know it's separated out and what we will essentially get is three separate g code files we're going to get two from the first one which will be the rough cut and then the detailed cut and then we'll get a third one from the second file which will be to finish off this profile cut and the drill holes now to clarify what i said earlier we're just going to run the simulator on this and make sure that the profile cut is the last thing and not the drill hole if we wind this back and just work through we can see it's cutting all the holes first once it's done that it goes on to the profile cut which is exactly what we want so with everything done let's go and get our g code generated what we should do is click on the untitled in the top left and let's give it a name i'll call it maze nice and simple save changes and actually what we also need to do is name our artboards themselves so we're going to click on here and we're going to click rename for this and we're going to call this maze job1 click rename and then we'll come to the second board rename this and call it something different maze job two i should explain the reason we rename these is because when we're about to export the g code it will give them the same name if you don't separate them out so we're going to come to machine now you may notice this looks a little bit different from our last episode easily have updated their software but all the settings are still available they're just in this general settings menu now so that opens up we know all these settings are safe from our last tutorial we'll leave spindle controllers automatic default rpm at twenty thousand and then we're going to click generate g code once generated we'll then click export g code and as we can see it's just exported as maze job two that's because we've done the secondary work area so we'll come back out now go over to the first one we know this has a roughing and a detail bit so we're going to go machine general settings again generate gcode and then download the roughing g code and also the detailed g-code now the only thing you need to remember at this point is the order that you want to machine these out we're going to start with the maze job1 roughing to clear a lot of material out we're then going to move on to the detail to finish this up and bring all the detail back that was missed in the small lettering like the start we're then going to go over to the third file maze job 2 in order to do that profile cut and the few holes within the maze itself so with all the g-code exported let's move over to our machine and start to get this routed out so for ease i've already positioned the bit over the bottom left-hand corner of the material and we are starting with the 1 8 bit so that is already installed so the first thing i'm going to do within ugs is click reset zero now as mentioned we are going to be using the z probe today so i've already got the probe module open what i'm going to do is raise the z axis up by about 10 millimeters and then move it in diagonally by about 20 millimeters we're then going to put the z probe in place [Music] and click initiate probe move those out of the way and click return to zero then we're going to come to open we're going to head to the desktop and the first one we want to load in is the job one roughing pass so when we click on that open it everything looks like we're expecting it's going to machine the maze itself fed and the word maze and obviously we know the detail pass will go into some of that finer work on the second run so with that all done we know everything looks good we're gonna head up and click play and start this job off [Music] so with the first cook done we're now going to swap the bit over for a 1 16 bit reset the z and then start the second job to do all the detail work now when it comes to resetting the z i'm just going to bring this back in slightly by 10 millimeters diagonally place the z probe back in position [Music] and run it again [Music] i just held that in place because it's balancing on the edge i wanted to make sure it was secured as it was moving the boat so we'll take that back out the way we'll then come back over to ugs click return to zero we'll then come up to open come down to the detail pass open that we can see it's now loading the extra information from the detail pass and finishing off all the fine cut areas so with that in place we'll click click play and get this job started so with the detail cut down we're going to drop the 1 8 bit back in reset the z and then finish off this job we'll bring it back in diagonally by 10 millimeters with the z probe back in place [Music] and start the z probe off we'll then load the final and third part of the file in so we'll come down to mae's job too and as we can see from this it is just spot drilling a few holes from these thin blue lines that we can see in the visualizer and then multiple passes to do the finishing cut so we know everything is in place we'll go ahead and get this final run done [Music] so that's the job done let's pull the bend back get it popped off and see how it looks so just a quick tip whenever you are sanding wood always sand with the direction of the grain you get a much better and much cleaner finish and one final tip if you're struggling to get into the channels obviously you can use a very thin piece of sandpaper to try and get in there you can also use something like an allen key that is the same width as the channel just push it in there move it around the maze and it should flatten out any rough spots and start to make sure everything is level for the ball to roll around so after a bit of machine time and a few tool changes we've got our finalized product and i'm really happy with the way this has come out the cuts are nice and sharp and it's got a bit of contrast here because of how deep we've gone there's no burning or lumps around the profile cut on the edge which means that's great we've got a we've got a good balance with the feeds and speeds the i expected some of the smaller detail in the word shot um start to have broken off and it hasn't so that's probably a tribute to using a good piece of solid wood all i really had to do was that light sand in and run the allen key around the grooves just to clean them up a bit one thing i should say is obviously i use a nice piece of oak a lot of people only have soft wood soft woods like pine and douglas spur and things are a bit more fibrous so you can often find cleaning inside the grooves may be a bit more difficult however it's cheaper and more accessible so if you've only got soft wood don't worry about it you just have to spend a little bit more time getting the sandpaper in there and clearing everything up now technically that is the end of today's tutorial but why should the creativity stop there so one extra thing i've done is i've continued to make a clear cover that will sit over the top of this to stop the ball bearings from falling out when we're playing with it this was really easy to do all i did was take that outline profile cut off the second job we did create a third job change the depth of cut down to two millimeters and then cut a piece of acrylic out on the 3018 probe and it fits perfectly but we can also go on to do a few more things for example you could um seal the wood itself to really make the grain pop you could paint everything you could put epoxy into the letters and you know mix colors and stuff like that stick around till the end of the video to see exactly what i've done with my maze and how i finished it off now that is everything for today's episode as always thank you for watching any comments and tips for me as well let me know in the chat section down below i love talking to you all final thanks as always goes to my patrons thank you for keeping the channel going i love the support and if you want to get involved check out the links in the description area below that is everything for today and i'll see you all on the next episode i began by filling the word start with milliput and epoxy putty once that was set i sanded it back flat i then clear coated the whole of the maize with varnish i've poured little ball bearings into the word maze so that it filled them up but still allowed them to rattle about i put the clear acrylic cover on and the game was ready to go

Channel: James Dean Designs

Views: 8,753

Keywords: 3018PRO, 3018 pro, 3018 pro CNC, CNC, 3018, 3018pro build, 3018 pro assembly, small cnc, desktop cnc, laser cnc, woodworking cnc, woodworking, test cut, CNC software, Using 3018, 3018 beginner, 3018pro beginner, 3018 tips ticks, cnc tips tricks, cnc help, laser help, cnc beginner, beginners guide to cnc routing, beginners guide to easel, 3018 easel, 3018 easel settings, 3018 pro easel, learn to design cnc, cnc design basics, sainsmart, foxalien

Id: 8A1WqsQM_LA

Length: 35min 30sec (2130 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 05 2021