After seeing David Carr’s political map relief I was inspired to do something similar. I thought it would be cool to model the Boston skyline. Since I also wanted to see how fine I could get the resolution, I took a jpg, and using the GIMP program, made it a black and white image with 50 colors and then put it through cad. I had it create a file with the following specs:

z min: -.75″

nz: 50 (one pass for each color)

tool size: 1/32

At 20, 20 speed the file was going to take about 12 hours. I was still going to try to cut it but Shawn pointed out to me that our 1/32″ bit didn’t have a long enough shank to cut at -.75″.

I went back, edited the file down to 10 colors and filled in the sky so as to leave just the buildings.

Then I created a .rml file in cad using a 1/16″ bit, .-.5 z min, and 11 nz.

After about 2 passes, the machine did a dramatic z drop and I had to stop it. Shawn suggested that I use more nz steps so I created a new file with 30 steps.

I piped the .rml files directly to the serial port through the command line as the computer thats hooked up to the mini mill has older software.

I piped the .rml files directly to the serial port through the command line as the computer thats hooked up to the mini mill has older software.