So I got a Shapeoko a little over a year ago now, initially setup a laser head on it which worked great but scared the hell out of me. I then switched to a dremel and tried cutting some things but found that it was just too noisy and dusty to use in the spare room of my apartment.
So my wife insisted I build an enclosure for it to keep the mess and noise inside. Fast forward 6months (other things got in the way) and I’m almost finished.
Really looking forward to getting the last of the foam in place and rebuilding my Shapeoko to the maximum size inside the box.
Cool. I love the ‘wife in a box’. Any plans for a video monitoring system so you can see if things are working okay?
Yep I’ve already got fmpegstreamer setup on my raspberry pi to stream webcam footage from inside. Also considering mounting one of the pi-cam cameras onto the dustshoe so I can look directly at the endmill, but I’m a bit concerned that vibration will just make it completely useless so will have to do some testing yet.
Going to be setting up the Raspberry Pi to control my TinyG and build a little web interface to bring it all together.
How much noise reduction did you achieve?
Not had a chance to measure that yet since I haven’t had my Shapeoko running properly since I started the build!
I’m hoping to get to a first cut sometime in the next week and will let you know. But from testing just the vacuum in the bottom its pretty significant. The vacuum goes from being something I have to shout over (its a Ridgid vac), to something I can have a quiet normal conversation over.
To be honest though I have gone way overboard. The walls are all two panels of 3/4" OSB, with green glue in between then screwed together. I then have 1 1/2" of egg crate style soundproofing foam on each panel. There’s a 3 1/2" thick ultratouch denim insulation in between the top and bottom boxes and in the top and bottom of the whole enclosure.
Around the doors are bulb seals so they seal up nice and tight and the handles are compression latches so they pull it all tight. When I first turned the vac on it created so much suction inside the top section that I couldn’t open the door. Realised that this didn’t work well for cooling so I’m now setting up baffled pathways for 7cm fans to pull air into the top section and pull some cold air into the bottom section to keep the vac cool.
