Over the last 15 years, 3D printing has moved from a niche hobby / expensive manufacturing tool to something accessible to almost everyone - but there's limits to what you can make with 3D printing alone, and the materials that you can use.

Enter subtractive manufacturing / machining! With a CNC controlled milling machine, you can make parts out of wood, plastics and even metals like aluminium and steel. Combined with a 3D printer, the possibilities are almost endless and the scope for positive change by bringing local, small-scale manufacturing back is, in my opinion, immense.

The problem is, traditional CNC mills are usually tens of thousands of dollars, huge and full of proprietary hardware and software - which creates a high barrier to entry for anyone wanting to explore the CNC world as a hobbyist.

Enter the Millennium Machines Milo - an open design desktop CNC mill that, with enclosure, can fit in a 1.1x0.9m footprint - and is capable of cutting Aluminium with enough accuracy for even the very skilled hobbyist.

The machine can be partly 3D printed and assembled for less than £1500 - while it is not quite yet 3D printer levels of ubiquity, it is almost an order of magnitude cheaper than the low end mills from traditional manufacturers.

However - the jump in knowledge from 3D printing and additive manufacturing to subtractive manufacturing and milling is significant.

As a developer on the Millennium Machines team, I am taking responsibility for improving the ease of use for new Milo owners, by writing fully featured, supported configurations for RepRapFirmware 3.5+ for the Milo.

This includes configurations aimed at machines built from kits, but also for users who are self-sourcing following the original Bill of Materials.

I am also lead developer on MillenniumOS, an "Operations System" for RepRapFirmware which is designed to make machining with a Milo approachable by a complete novice.

It implements post-processors, a gcode dialect and a set of machine control macros that include probing, spindle and coolant control, rotation compenation, tool changes and work-offset management in safety-first fashion, with integrated tutorials and a configuration wizard.

My intention is for this to be a machine-agnostic system, allowing it to support any 3-axis CNC machine that runs RepRapFirmware.

I also spend a lot of time writing and fixing documentation for the Millennium Machines team - I built out the documentation system as it stands today, which allows us to fix our documentation in minutes rather than hours, and I help to manage the GitHub organisation as well.

I have spent a significant amount of time learning about CNC, RepRapFirmware and its' macro system, and the Milo itself, and that puts me in a great position to continue development of hardware, firmware and software to advance desktop CNC machining with the Millennium Machines team.

I am not currently employed - I resigned from my full time role as a Systems / DevOps Engineer of 11 years back in 2021, and have been taking on odd jobs, working on CNC systems, and doing the odd freelance / consulting gig on the side since then.

My work on RRF and MillenniumOS in particular is something that I would very much like to continue, but I will shortly need to find full-time employment again to be able to afford the bills. Any amount of sponsorship helps to delay this necessity and allows me more time to work on making machining easier for all.

I intend to continue improving the user experience of the Milo CNC mill in my spare time at the very least.

Over time, and with the help of many others, hopefully we will make desktop CNC milling as ubiquitous as 3D printing is now.

Thanks,

Ben