Carving the Surface of the Moon (Short Version) - CNC Project

Описание: This is a quick edit of my CNC carving a part of the moon's surface on a block of high density machine foam. Carving this took a total of 48 minutes. The final part is 2.5" by 3.5" by 1".

I started by finding a high quality heightmap in greyscale .tif format. then I croped it to an interesting feature of the moon (using gimp). From there I opened the cropped .tif file in Vectric Aspire (you can use any CAD/CAM software that can emboss a surface from a grey scale image: Rhino, artCAM, etc). Aspire makes it very easy to convert the image file into a 3D format with it's 3D Textures from image files tool. After all that was done I setup the tool path using the 3D finish button and saved it as a gcode format that my machine can understand.

Here is the website that I downloaded the file from: http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc/view_rdr...

A simpler way to do it would be to find a .stl or other format 3D file of the surface then use a CAM software capable of creating a tool path directly from it.

If you want to try topography of the earth here is a great website you can get .stl files from anywhere on the planet: http://jthatch.com/terrain2stl/

I used a 1/8'' diameter ball-nose bit and did one finish cut with the CNC. I ran the machine at 100 ipm during the entire cut.

If you want to watch the whole process unintereupted (at 12x speed) here is that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e36C2...

Copyright free music provided by:
Bright Future - Silent Partner:    • Bright Future – Silent Partner (No Copyrig...