Shopbot tour

Jens Dyvik gave the team a show-and-tell tour of the ShopBot setup in the lab.

He shared the story of a previous visit, when he came to see his close friend Hakon. Hakon wanted to build a goldsmith workbench extension. Jens designed the extension and was about to start machining it when he discovered that the ShopBot was not functioning correctly.

Wanting to finish the project, Jens started looking at what was available in the lab and found an Arduino Uno. He realized it could be used to control the ShopBot. He asked around for additional components and made a trip to a local store to pick up some basic connectors, a DIN rail, and a control box. Using the materials available, he managed to bring the ShopBot back to life.

That same ShopBot is still running today. It has many years of history and is one of the first machine in the Fab Lab network. Its location is also quite special, housed in a barn just a short walk from the lab. While working on the machine, you’re likely to be accompanied by friendly horses and curious sheep.

Jens modifications are well documented and are available on GitHub.

Jens powered up the machine for the team, and it ran very smoothly. Since we didn’t have any G-code prepared to demonstrate it, the team wrote a simple G-code file on the spot to show how the machine operates.

The control shoftware is called Openbuilds software.