Risk Game Board

I've made quite a few cork-board maps, in fact it probably makes up the majority of my machine's output.

So when me and a friend got talking about how long it was since we'd played Risk, I decided to put my expertise to use and cut my own Risk board out of cork.

For those who haven't heard of it 'Risk' (or 'Stratego') is a world domination board game, you have several units and use them to protect your own territories and attack others, the outcomes of these battles are decided by dice rolls. The goal is to expand your empire until you have defeated all the other players

I did a fair bit of research about all the different versions, and the standard game size, then began drawing up the parts as usual.

The pieces come out of the machine like this, I put vinyl over the areas where the text was engraved so that I could paint the letters. The machine cuts a stencil as it's engraving, although not perfect I've had quite good success with this technique before, but never with such small text.

To finish the pieces, I stencil the letters in black, add on any islands with stiff wire, and then stain the whole continent its proper colour. I think I would have preferred them left unstained, but once I'd done one I had to do the others as well.

I could have left it there and gone out and bought the other parts, but I got the idea in my head to make my own dice.

I have some scavenged door panels lying around that appeared to be made of solid mahogany, so I cut a strip off and began by machining a flat on both sides.

Once it was flat and laminar I measured it then had my mill cut out several perfect cubes.

This is my first attempt at multi sided machining, the main problem of which is lining your pieces up when you flip them over.
Seeing as I had 5 dice each with 6 sides I needed a way to perfectly line up each side and relatively quickly.

I decided to machine a hole the exact size of the dice, this way I just have to push each blank die into the slot and hit go, then I just switch to a new die nice and quickly and go again.

It still took me over an hour to do all the dice, but once they were finished I was really happy with them.

All that was left was to print out some cards, get some pieces. I'm using map pins, which I think is a significant improvement over the original because you're not always knocking your army over. I managed to find three different types of coloured pins to use as the 1, 5 and 10 units. But because they don't take up as much space you could easily just use lots of ones.

The cards were a rush job, thrown together with google images in InDesign. I would have liked to mill some lino prints and stamp the cards that way, but I doubt I'll get round to it now.

The actual game progressed as it always does, I overreach, then am quickly crushed into a small corner, where I hide while the other two duke it out. (I'm yellow, both figuratively and literally)

Overall I think it was a pretty successful game, the only complaint was that it was a bit awkward fishing around in the box of pins to find the right one, they asked for a subdivided box, but I though a scrap of cork on which you could organise your units would work just as well.

Next I fancy having a go at a settlers of Catan game, but whipping out all my old Warhammer scenery stuff to make the board.

Milling PCBs and Circuit Board Evolution

I've been dabbling in electronics for years. Most of the time this involves starting on a breadboard and then transferring your finished circuit onto stripboard.

More often than not I'm trying to squeeze far too much stuff into a tiny space, for example in my Zippo Burglar Alarm.
Which means that the resulting boards are an awful mess of wires and massive solder lumps.

For this post I'm going to use my Hellboy Corpse Locator light board as an example, because it's been through a fair few revisions.
It's a fairly simple piece, I needed a board to fit under the dial of my corpse locator prop, and make the dome light up red. A simple task electronically, but mechanically it's difficult to get everything to fit.

I started by using a tank cutter to cut disks out of stripboard.

I was surprised by how well this worked, it made it easier, not having to shape each board by hand, but each one still took about 10 minutes.

I wanted to use surface mount LEDs, they were on the copper side, meaning everything else was on the reverse side. Which left me trying to find a way to create a second battery contact on the reverse side of the board.

The most reliable solution I could come up with was stitching a grid with copper wire.

Again, at the time, I was proud of my little inovation, conductive paint had too much resistance, glueing foil to the board had been problematic, this wasn't perfect (some wide copper tape would have been good) but working with materials at hand it did the job.

Once everything else was attached, the board looked like this. 

After making about 10 of these I managed to get them quite neat. But it was very labour intensive, each one probably took over 3 hours of quite fiddly work. 

And due to the nature of cutting out the boards, each one was slightly different, in where the LEDs went and where the wires were routed.

Many months later, the dawn of my CNC machine, and obviously one of the first things I wanted to have a go at was milling PCBs. I drew up the design in Vectorworks (EagleCAD* is the proper tool) and bought some copper clad board and was very easily able to cut out a simple PCB.

Milled PCBs are different to proper manufactured PCBs, you start with a solid layer of copper and simply mill away 'isolation paths' to create your tracks.

The one on the left is my very first attempt, I just used a cheap V bit that I had and the result was some very rough looking paths, but an entirely functional board.
My second attempt (using a 0.8mm ball nose) was much neater, but after my PCB milling bits arrived from China I was able to cut really neat boards. These are 0.2mm isolation paths, so potentially I can mill some really complex boards with lots of tiny surface mount parts.

Designing for CNC always affects your design. For example I wanted to take advantage of the fact that the copper layer could act as my other battery contact (no more stitching) so that meant the board was flipped and everything was soldered on the back. 

This also meant I had to switch to normal 3mm LEDs and mount them upside down (poking through the board) I originally use smt LEDs to keep the board thin, but the limiting factor is always the battery thickness so this works out fine, and the 3mm leds are brighter.

The boards look really cool now, very neat and I can do cool stuff like engrave labels and my logo. But the main thing that makes these far better than their predecessors is the time they take to produce. Each one probably takes about 20 minutes of milling, because it requires several tool changes. But then only about 10 minutes of soldering and it's finished.

Also each one is identical, which means I can add matching screw holes to my plastic corpse locator parts. rather than the tedious task of lining up and drilling each individual part to match it's specific board.



* Eagle is a program which allows you to draw up circuit diagrams, as well as layout circuit board designs for sending off to have fabricated. With the proper add on you can also create Gcode to send to a CNC machine. It sounds like a fantastic tool, but when I had a go there was a lot to learn and, for such a simple circuit, with mostly through hole components it was just slowing me down.

CNC Mill Build - Enclosure

After finally getting the mill running it became obvious that I was nowhere near done.

Firstly, in their current position the electronics didn't give the machine enough room to move freely, so they would have to be relocated.

Also my current method of using drawing pins to hold down material wasn't going to be a permanent solution.


The first problem is easily fixable, I collected a bunch of connectors, then got out my calipers, cracked open Vectorworks* and began designing an enclosure. 
I cut all the pieces out of 3mm MDF and when assembled they looked like this.

From the front all you see is the name and power switch.

One side features a cut out for a fan.

The back has all the connections, A/C power in, parallel signals from the computer and five molex connectors, one for each motor and one for the limit switches.


I designed the box to be low profile so it would fit in the sliding drawer under my desk.

Here it's nice and out of the way but easily accessible if I need to fiddle with it.

Under the hood, you can see the power supply takes up most of the space. Main power is routed through the illuminated switch at the front. The 24V supply then gives power to the motors, it also drives a tiny 5V regulator for the logic power supply and the motor is supplied by a slightly larger 12V regulator (you can see it glued to wall on the right)

I found some little fuse holders and intend to put a small fuse in after the switch. There's also room at the back for adding more connections, for things like spindle control and an emergency stop button.



Being the first real thing I've made with my machine this taught me a lot. Firstly my machine is pretty damn accurate. 
The pieces just fit, I was expecting to have to sand things, but they actually fit great and I measured the pieces to be well within 0.2mm of what I intended, that's nowhere near what some CNC machines can achieve but with MDF it's more accuracy than I'll ever need.

Another thing to note is, always measure your material. I should have remembered this from when I designed stuff for laser cutting, but my 3mm MDF turned out to be 3.2mm, so my box joints aren't quite flush.

A lot of time designing this was spent on the engraving. The majority of fonts these days are solid blocks, you can turn them into outlines with a vector program, but the best results are achieved from single line fonts. You can see that the axis labels I engraved on the back of the box are a bit chunky, I didn't like that so I spent a while manually creating single line letters for my title font.

This was tedious but I'm happy with how the final thing came out.

The M⁶ for short

I'd like to make the lettering black so it pops more, but I can't think of a good way to do this, hand painting would be tricky, and detract from the nice clean finish.

The easiest solution is to mill all the way through a material and place black behind it.

I also installed a hold down table. Essentially this just involved sinking a bunch of t-nuts into the back of my board in a grid. I now have a grid of points where I can bolt things down to the table.

Above you can see me marking out holes, and a couple of nuts ready to insert.
The grid is now finished, I'll snap a proper picture next time I'm using it.

I've actually found that for most materials  double sided tape is a better solution, most of the time the clamping bolts just get in the way.


I've been happy with this set up for the past few weeks, I've had a go at milling a phone dock, pcbs, and at the moment I'm milling maps out of cork. :D

One thing I haven't really tried is milling plastic, I've got some chunks of acrylic on the way so that's next on my to do list.


*Vectorworks is my CAD program of choice, mainly because it's what I used during my architecture degree. However it seems that I'm in the minority using this program. Most people use AutoCad or SketchUp, or for simple 2D work, Inkscape.
Supposedly AutoCad was designed by engineers and Vectorworks by architects.
I've got a copy of Illustrator, but most of the time I get frustrated with the alien pen tool, give up and switch back to Vectorworks. 

CNC Mill Build - It Works!

Very quick update, I did finally sort out my electronics problem and was able to mill my first piece.

Behold the power of my machine:

When I shot this video my setup looked like this.

Already I'm not happy with it, the electronics are too close and don't allow the wires enough room so I can't use the full length of the Y axis, also they really need to be covered. 

I'm currently holding work down using push pins, not a great solution.
Already working on changing all that. But for now it works !



See my next stage of improvements here.

CNC Mill Build - eLectronics

The last post saw me putting the finishing touches to my machine build, by adding the belts. Unfortunately that's the easy part over, now I'm tackling electronics.


There are two stages to controlling a CNC machine. The first is a controller which will take a Gcode file* and turn it into step and direction pulses that tell each motor when to turn.
The second is a motor driver which takes these low voltage data signals and sends high power signals to actually drive the motor.

For the driver (the second part) I'm using pololu a4988 drivers along with a stepper shield. After finally sourcing all the parts this is what they look like.

The driver is quite small, you can see one of them in the top left. The rest is just capacitors, to even out power, and connectors, to attach all the motors.

This board is a 'sheild' which is intended to be used with an arduino. You can use an arduino as your controller, but I wanted to use a PC because it gives me more control and a  nice graphical interface.

Which means I had to build a separate board to make it so the signals to and from this shield could be sent via a parallel cable.

This is what I put together. Again not much going on here, the parallel cable is broken out and the signals sent to the right sockets (so they match up when the shield is plugged in on top).

There is also a 5v regulator to supply the logic voltage and all the connections are optically isolated. This means that the CNC motors and the computer aren't physically connected, this means any noise caused by the motors won't affect the computer.

Bart Dring, of Buildlog.net designed this board which does exactly what I want. But he doesn't sell them anymore. So what I did was buy the arduino version (also designed by Bart, but now made by Reactive Substance) and adding in the missing components so that it was functionally the same. It probably would have been easier to just build the whole thing myself from Bart's schematic. But the black boards help with heat dissipation  as well as matching the drivers I bought, and looking badass.
Edit: of course now that the M6 is finished, I could design a new PCB with everything on and mill it on my machine, how ever I'm unlikely to ever get round to this.

Now the shield carrying the stepper drivers, just plugs in on top. Each one of those drivers (now with large blue heat sinks on) controls one of the motors, each motor has 4 wires.

The large silver box off to the left is the 24V power supply, this is the power that is used to drive the motors, the 5V logic is supplied by a small regulator I put on the lower board.


That's most of the hardware set up, the other end is an old PC running Ubuntu, I'm using LinuxCNC to control my machine, it's a very powerful tool (probably overkill for this little thing) but nice all the same.

What came next was lots or testing tinkering and , to be honest, swearing as I tried to figure out why it wouldn't work.

(figured it out eventually WooHoo!)




*Gcode is the end result of designing on a computer, it's composed of simple lines of text that instruct the machine where to go using an absolute positioning system. E.g. g0 x10 y10 would tell the machine to move to that co-ordinate (g0 is just max speed) so kind of like playing Battleships.

Cardboard Boba Bucket - Electronics

A huge gap here, bringing us closer to the present. Now working on some rangefinder electronics.

Rangefinder Electronics

Originally Posted 27-July-2009
I haven't posted anything in ages because I've been away (doing an Architecture degree)

But now I'm back and have got thoroughly stuck into making my rangefinder.

First of all I purchased a metronome kit from Maplin as well as some green LEDs.

As soon as I got the kit I assembled it according to the instructions and then began to sync the lights up to the right speed (2.13 Hz), by adjusting the two pots to 40KΩ each.

That was fairly easy and formed the basis for my rangefinder circuitry.

Next I desoldered the 9v clip, the LEDs and the capacitors. I re-soldered the capacitors, leaving longer leads so I could fold them down flat.

I had to extend the leads of the LEDs, this was fairly simple, I just soldered on some short lengths of wire and added heat shrink tubing.

I then re-soldered these longer LED's into place.
Also I filed off the unused areas of the board.

Until I could scavenge another resistor (maplin only sell them in massive sets) I'm leaving the circuitry here.

Total spend is now £9.58.

- Large card for main helmet & mask : £2.00
- Pint o' PVA Glue : £3.00 
- Metronome kit : £3.99
- Superbright green LED : £0.59

CNC Mill Build - Belting Along

The Z Axis I finished up last time now gets fitted to the front of the X carriage.

The Makerslide is slide between the V wheels attached to the front of the X carriage, and the black delrin nut is bolted in place.


The final task is to attach the pulleys and belts.

The red aluminium blocks are belt tensioners. By turning the bolt you can easy tune how tight your belts are.

That completes the physical build, or at least I've run out of kit parts.

The next thing to do will be to hook up some electronics and see if I can get it moving.

CNC Mill Build - Zzzzz

I am slightly regretting this procedural format I've locked myself into now, but I'd better finish it . 

In the previous post I bolted together the X and Y carriages to form the main framework of the machine. Now I'm tackling the Z axis.

The Z axis is different in that it is screw, rather than belt, driven.

The flexible coupler and flanged bearing are attached to a length of M8 threaded rod. The aluminium tape is wrapped round the rod to ensure a tight fit.

The threaded rod is coupled to the final motor and the bearing is sandwiched between the two Z plates.

The black brick is a delrin nut, it is threaded onto the screw and the final length of Makerslide is bolted on.

These are the spindle mounts, once the machine is finished they will hold the Dremel.

That finishes up the Z axis. Now all I have to do is mount it to the machine, 
and add the belts,
and sort the electronics...

CNC Mill Build - Squaring Up

Starting with the two Y motor plates I'm going to build the gantry for the X carriage I built last time.

These are the two X lengths of Makerslide as well as the belt anchors and a belt and pulley.  (I'm going to wait until the end to mount the belts.

The X carriage is now mounted between the two Y plates, completing the Y carriage.

Two more (longer) lengths of Makerslide and the two endplates.

I now have the basis of the machine assembled :D

The mechanics of this bolt together nice and easily, I'm less certain about the electronics :s

Next up is making the Z axis.

CNC Mill Build - X Carriage

This is continuing fromt he last post where I was assembling one of the Y plates.

This time I'm going to put together the X carriage.

X Plate (all plates are identical)

Motor, smooth idlers and fixings.

This starts off similarly to the Y plates, except that here the motor is mounted flush against the plate.

The two X plates get bolted together to create a nice solid box, here you can see what's going on inside (that shot was a lot harder to take than it looks, because nothing is fixed)

The last X plate finishes off the carriage, but in this step the V wheels for the Z axis are also added.

Next I'm going to bolt the motor carriages together to form the basis of the machine. : )

Once it's all squared up you get a much better idea of how the machine is going to work.