Shaper Origin: A Handheld CNC Router?

The Shaper Origin has been out in the marketplace for a while now. And I remember when I first saw this baby at a show, it really made smoke come out of my ears. I did not understand how it worked, what it was all about. And what I wanna do here is give you an overview of how this works and what it's all about. What we've got going here really is a handheld CNC. It looks like a router, but the router motor here moves independently of the base. You're gonna see that happen. So what we can do is we can bring designs, different elements in that we can see on the screen. And as we follow them here in broad strokes, the router motor is moving on its own to follow them in more finite strokes and make the cut. How does this all come together? It's gonna take advantage of what is called domino tape. And we'll get this onto the work surface. The tape is what tells the Origin where it is in the world, relative to your workpiece. Where we're going with this is, from this piece of padauk, we're gonna cut a bow tie, from that piece of hackberry, or into that piece of hackberry, we're gonna cut a relief that the bow tie is gonna go into. When we stick the tape down, it's gotta be less than three inches apart. It can be a little bit kerflooey. See how that's not parallel? That's fine. You don't have to be crazy hung up about how you stick it down, as long as it's close enough together. And on our work piece. Then on the unit, we get the opportunity to scan. We're in a new area. This is a new scan. And when I touch the green or click the green on the handle, it'll give me the opportunity to scan. And what you'll see is, when it successfully reads a domino, the domino turns blue. We just wanna get all of those into the picture. Now, when it comes to designs, we can do a bunch of different stuff. You'll see in a little bit, there's the opportunity to do things on board, to create designs right on board. Also, this is connected to the WiFi in my shop. I can go to what's called the Shaper Hub where designs have been done by other people, I can import those and use other people's designs. It also accepts a flash drive. So I can do my own designs and software, have them as an SVG file and bring those in via the flash drive. So that's what I've got going here. My bow tie, bow tie two is right there, SVG file. And I can bring that in, and now, there's the bow tie, and the dominoes show me my workspace. Those are the dominoes that are on the padauk. Those are the dominoes that are on the MDF. The MDF is just there to give me more real estate to scan to make sure that this has enough vision to understand where it is in the world. So of course, I want that bow tie to end up on the padauk. So once I've located it, I can place it. And we can then choose to cut. And there's the bow tie we can cut on the line, which is where we are right now. We can cut inside the line. We'll do that later, when we wanna create the pocket for the bow tie. In this case, we wanna cut outside of the line. We can control our depth of cut. I'm gonna do a first pass of an 1/8 of an inch. Now, what happens when I move this is, this bulls-eye has to remain in a certain proximity to that object line, to the bow tie. If I move away, it loses contact. And at that point, the router will actually lift out of the work. So, here there'll be in the work and 1/8 of an inch, if I get too far away and it can no longer make the cut, it'll automatically retract. We basically now know where the unit is X and Y, we know where it is on this plane. We don't know if it knows where it is vertically. That's what this Z is all about. So I'm gonna Z touch. All it does is come down, it kisses the router bit against the work, that's a zero. So now when I tell it to go in 1/8 inch in, it goes an 1/8 inch from there. My job now is just to control the unit, control the big handles so that I stay within that bulls-eye, and then you'll see the router motor doing small compensations to make sure it stays on track. There, it automatically retracted because I went outside. Get back on line. Increase to my final depth of cut. There's our bow tie. Now, even though I lift it off the workspace, I could come back, if I realized, okay, I cut a 1/4 inch deep, I meant to go 3/8 inch deep. If I come back, my cut is right there again. It knows where it is in the world by reading that tape. That takes care of the bow tie. When I am gonna do next is get set up to cut the pocket over here on that piece of hackberry. And then we'll have a look at that process. One of the things that's cool about the Origin is the concept of taking the tool to the work instead of the work to the tool. This big hackberry slab is a great example. Another would be, if I wanted to do an inlay in an existing hardwood floor, I can't lay that floor onto a CNC machine, but I could take this to it, and I could cut in a compass, or somebody's initials, or a picture of their dog or whatever it is they wanted inlaid into their floor. What I've done here on the hackberry is, to some extent, second verse, same as the first. Put the tape down. It's a new workspace. So scan that tape. I located the pocket for my bow tie. So it spans that big crack. And then, what I did as a starting point is, I started with what's called a pocketing cut. And that allowed me to get most of the waste out of the inside. But even if you look here on the screen, this is cool, it shows you where the pocketing cut ends. That green line is my actual edge that I need to cut to. So when I change that to inside, now, it's gonna take me right up to that green line in order to finish the cut that I need, in order for my bow tie to sneak in there. And we'll talk about if the bow tie doesn't fit, what our options are there. Now. Of course, I don't wanna tap too hard here, because I gotta be able to get it back out. Bow tie is just a little bit too big. Now, that's okay. Because, what we can do here, is take advantage of what's called the offset. And when I do that, I can tell it an amount. So in that case, .030 of an inch. And when I come back and cut again, that means, it's gonna make that whole recess .030 bigger. So, what you could do is, create your bow tie, then do a test cut in scrap to determine what that offset needs to be if you need one at all, before we come to the final piece in order to finesse that and make sure that your bow tie is gonna be a perfect fit. Now, in both cases here, we applied the domino tape to a surface, did our scan, and then started the work. There's another way that we can do this. And that's taking advantage of what's called the Origin Workstation. And with that, ah, you'll see it in just a second. It's a different setup, and it lets us walk right up to that device and get to work. Let me show you how that works. This is the Workstation that I mentioned earlier. And a couple of things going on here. One, we don't have to stick domino tape down each time, 'cause that's permanently affixed here. We're always gonna scan this as our workspace. Now, the way to think about this is, we can fix our work into the Workstation in a variety of different ways that you're gonna see here. This is gonna be a helpful device, because it allows me to get the Origin here without fear of tipping. That's a great setup when we're bringing material up like we would in here to cut a tenon in the end of it or a double tenon, or a tenon in the end of an angled leg. Lots of different scenarios there where we wanna make sure that we've got good support on the Origin. The other way that we can bring work into this, and this is what we'll be doing today, is to use this table. And then, we can set material on there in order to do our work. So what'll happen is, it'll be double-faced taped. And that of course is the same way that padauk was held to the workbench earlier. Double-faced tape to secure our work here, and then we can do our layout and do our cuts. A couple of things that we need to work with. One is our height. Easiest way to do that is to have this bar in place. Bring this up until it kisses, lock it. This goes away. Now we're ready to double-faced tape that in place. Now I'm gonna put this on. I'm gonna secure it by feeling underneath here to have this edge approximately parallel to that MDF table. Doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. And you'll see why in a little bit. All right, to start out with, I'm gonna bring my Origin over, I'm gonna scan the surface, and then we'll look at a little bit different set up for locating the work onto this work piece. Now, a little bit different scenario for setting up our workspace. We're gonna use the grid and we're gonna create a grid that's specific to the piece I put on there. So this is neat because the elm burl that we're working with is a pretty funky shape. It's got this live edge on it still, not a perfectly straight cut here. So, the way we can get all of this figured out is, the router bit itself that I have in place is gonna help me find the edges of my work piece. So. I'm lowering the cutter. Perfect depth doesn't matter at this point, I just want it to project down to where it can kiss up against the edge of our material. Now it's asking me for location number one. Right there, I pushed the bit against the edge of my work and I push green. Location number two, it's on a line with location number one. So I'm finding this front edge for the Origin. And then for three, I'm coming over to the end. And what that gives me now on my screen, or the left edge and the bottom edge of my workpiece. And one of the things I talked about is, doing the artwork or the design work that you need to do for this. So we can work in another piece of software, save it as an SVG file and bring it in. So this file called Place is on my flash drive. And what this is now doing is on that grid. And again, left edge, bottom edge. It's locating my text, which is inside that box. So once I hit the green button, that's gonna place it for me, so I can get that where I want it to be. Place. Then we'll be ready to cut. I've got in the Origin now a V bit, and that's gonna let me cut those lines. One of the things that you'll see a little bit differently here is I'm gonna take advantage of a button on the handle once we're cutting, which is an auto button. And you'll see this happen, when I'm in the bull's-eye and I press auto, the machine is automatically gonna make the turns for me. So, this is nice and it really simplifies on a finer text like this, it simplifies that process of following the curves so that I'm not moving the Origin as much as I otherwise would. Gonna set my bit. And the big reveal. There we are. Next thing, I'm going to change cutters. And then we're gonna put a recess in here that we can put our stuff into, so we really do have a place for everything. I got my bit changed, and I wanna take just a second. Again, I'm not intending to give you a complete Origin how-to here, but a good overview of what can happen. So, onboard design, oddly, we touch Design. That makes some sense. Create. And then you can see there's a menu here, one of which is Box Joint, that's already set up for you. But we can do circles, rectangles, pen, text. So all of that can happen right here, and it's all just touchscreen stuff. So there we just created a two inch diameter circle. And then, because it's still knows where it is on the workspace, we can move around. There's a text we already did, and we can locate that. You can even see the live edge of the burl itself. We can locate that onto our piece. So I'm gonna refine that just a little bit, and then come back and show you where I'm at. Very similar to what you saw on the pocket for the bow tie, I put an oval onto my work piece, and then, I used the pocketing cut to take a bunch of waste out of the center. Now, I'm ready to change that to an inside cut to do the final cut on that pocket, on that nice little oak. And to wrap up this piece, I'm gonna plunk another little oval over here, great place to throw your flash drives or your pocket change. But really cool, a way to show what the Origin and the Workstation are capable of. So again, overall, the agenda here was to give you a feel, remembering how it was for me when I saw this baby for the first time. Give you a feel for how it works, what comes together to make all of this happen? How do the dominoes relate to the Origin and everything else? So, hopefully that worked for you and you now have a better understanding of what this does and how it does it.