Making a CNC Mini Maze Game With Carvera and Fusion

In this Instructable, we are looking at how we can manufacture a mini maze game using a desktop CNC mill and Autodesk Fusion! Makera is a manufacturer of high precision and easy to use desktop CNC machines, as well as a company built by makers, for makers, in the era of makers. This Instructable is intended to guide users of all levels through the steps needed for manufacturing a fun and simple project like a maze game with a CNC machine.

While we are looking at how this project can be produced using the Carvera Desktop CNC and Fusion, similar steps and techniques could be implemented to make the same project on a different CNC or with different resources that you might have available. The Carvera and Carvera Air are compatible with a wide range of CAM programs, including MakeraCAM, Fusion, VCarve, Kiri:Moto, and more which allows you to create just about anything on any device or with any prior skill level.

In addition to writing and sharing how to make this project in this Instructable, we've also created a YouTube video to guide you through these steps. And for our educators, check out our Machining Puzzles and Games lesson plan for your classroom!

For additional information, support, and resources, visit Makera.com or check out our YouTube Channel and Wiki Page.

To manufacture a mini maze game like the one we are looking at in this Instructable, you will need the following:

• A CNC Mill or Router, like the Carvera
• A CAM program, like Autodesk Fusion
• Stock or Material to make the project, we are using:
• Epoxy tooling board that is 100 mm x 150mm x 10mm
• Clear Acrylic that is 100 mm x 150 mm x 3 mm
• Small machine screws
• A copper BB
• Clamps and tools to secure the stock for manufacturing
• A piece of spoil board or sacrificial material to protect your bed
• Bits for your CNC, we are using:
• 3.175mm x 12 mm drill bit
• 2 mm x 10 mm drill bit
• 3.175mm x 12mm Single Flute Flat Endmill
• 3.175mm x 25mm Single Flute Flat Endmill

Before we can move into manufacturing, we need to plan and design the parts for the maze. This step is completed using a computer-aided-design program, or CAD. You could use a wide range of CAD programs to design your puzzle, we recommend using Tinkercad if you're a beginner or Autodesk Fusion for a more advanced alternative.

As you design your maze, there are a few key things that you need to consider:

• Stock thickness:
• We can use our CNC's to machine away material, but we can't add material like a 3D printer. The thickest your maze can be is however thick your stock is. Stock is also often imperfect, and the top surface is usually not perfectly flat. As such, its usually a good idea to machine away material for a higher quality finish, so we would suggest making the thickness of your maze a bit less than the thickness of your stock, though that is not always necessary.
• Size:
• Like the thickness, the size of our maze is limited by the stock as we need to have enough material to cut our parts, including a small margin around the outer edges so that the stock can be secured.
• Detail / Corners:
• CNC's work through subtractive manufacturing, or by removing material to create our parts. This is done through our cutting tools, or bits. If we want to cut a corner that is 1mm in radius, we would need a 1 mm bit to do this as a bit larger would not be able to fit into the corner. As you design your parts for CNC production, consider the tools you have available to ensure that you are designing something which can manufactured with your available resources.
• Material:
• Your CNC and material choice may dictate what type of detail or design you are able to produce. For example, you might not have a 1 mm bit for small corners that would work with aluminum, meaning a softer material like wood or epoxy may be needed. Consider all resources available when designing a part to ensure greater success down the road.

We also recommend prototyping your parts out of something soft and affordable, like epoxy tooling board or machinable wax before moving onto a more expensive or harder material for the final iteration. Sometimes the perfect setup to get the desired result takes some experimentation. Don't be afraid to make mistakes and return to the design stages to improve! You can learn more about this in our getting started video for choosing stock.

After you have identified these parameters, you can move into designing your maze around your material and machine constraints. We've designed the maze to be 10 mm thick to match our 10 mm stock. We've also made the paths in the maze a minimum of 5 mm wide to fit our BB which is about 4 mm. This should leave a bit of wiggle room to allow for the BB to travel.

We also decided to place 3.175mm pockets to mark the starting and ending position of the maze, as well as 2mm pilot holes for the screws we will be using to secure the acrylic cover to the bottom part of the maze. For the clear cover, we made this a new part so that it could be machined separately from the base part of the maze. This was extruded to be 3mm to match the thickness of the stock we are using.

And if you are interested, you can download the model we are using in this Instructable for free from the knowledge sharing page on our Wiki Site.

After we've designed the parts of our Maze, we need to bring it into Fusion's Manufacture tab so we can manufacture our project. We will be doing this twice as we will be manufacturing the maze part out of epoxy, then the cover out of acrylic later on.

If you designed your maze in Fusion, you can easily switch between the design tab and the manufacture tab to do this. If you designed the maze in Tinkercad, you can use the Send to Fusion feature to transfer your Tinkercad designs directly into Fusion. And if you used another CAD program, or downloaded our example model, you can import a STEP or DXF file type into Fusion to begin the manufacturing stages of the process.

Once in the manufacture tab, press Setup to setup this project. You will need to select your CNC machine, as well as ensure that Milling is selected as the manufacturing process. Fusion has an extensive library of CNC machines to choose from, and you can add or create your own machine as well. The Fusion profiles for the Carvera and included bits have been created by Makera for ease of use, and they can be downloaded here.

For the origin, this may vary based on the machine that you are using. This origin point should match where your probing or origin positioning system will measure the stock on your CNC. The Carvera uses a wireless probe to automatically measure the stock in the top-left corner by default, so we want to choose Stock Box Point and select the top-left corner of the stock to match this default position for our machine.

Ensure that only the maze part is selected to be manufactured by clicking Body, then clicking on the maze in your design.

Under the Stock tab, you can keep the settings as a relative stock size, but we suggest setting a fixed size to match the piece of stock you are using. In addition to setting the length, width, and depth of your stock, you can also offset your parts from the edges of the stock to position them in the material. We recommend leaving a margin of at least 10 mm on all edges to save room for clamps and screws. We also recommend ensuring that your part is even with the bottom of the stock (0mm Z offset from bottom) so that only the top face needs to be machined for this simple project.

Once the machine, part, and stock has been set, press OK.

To machine the maze part of this project, we are going to create 5 operations:

Drill Operation #1: The first operation is going to be a drilling operation using the 2mm drill bit (set to tool #6). After creating this operation, we can select our bits and adjust the feed and speed settings based on the material we are using, as discussed in our getting started video for speeds and feeds. In the geometry tab, we want to select the four pilot holes to be drilled. In heights, we can select the stock top as our top height, and then the bottom of our holes as the bottom height. Whenever drilling, it is important to adjust your drilling process based on your material. If you were using a harder material like aluminum, you should enable peck drilling to avoid unnecessary wear on your bits.

Drill Operation #2: We will create the second drill operation very similarly to how we made the first. The difference for this operation is that we will be using the 3.175mm drill bit (set to tool #1), and we are going to select the hole profiles for the start and finish pockets. Even though these are pockets, we can use the drilling operation to create these features as the bit is the size of the pocket we want to create.

2D Pocket Operation #1: We will then create our first pocket operation to machine the area where the clear cover will sit nested in the maze. After creating this operation, select the 3.175mm x 12mm single flute end mill (set to tool #4), and adjust the feed and speed parameters based on your stock. We can then select the pocket for the clear cover in the geometry tab, and select the stock top as our top height and the bottom of the pocket as our bottom height in the heights tab. In passes, we want to enable multiple depths to machine this area in multiple passes. We also like to use feed optimization and smoothing to reduce excess wear on our bits and also reduce the overall machine time.

2D Pocket Operation #2: The second pocket operation is going to use the 3.175mm x 25mm end mill (set to tool #3), and this is where we are going to machine the paths for the maze. After selecting the bit and speeds and feeds, select the paths for the maze as a pocket in the geometry tab. We can then adjust the heights and passes tab as we've done previously. The reason we used two different length end mills is because we always want to use the shortest possible bit to keep the bit as rigid as possible. You can learn more about this in our getting started video for choosing bits.

2D Contour Operation: The last operation we need to make is a 2D contour to cut out the maze part from our stock. We will again use the 3.175mm x 25mm end mill (tool #3), and set the speed and feed settings as we did previously. In geometry, we need to select the bottom edge of the maze part as a chain. We then need to enable tabs, which will hold the part in place during machining. Tabs can then be cut off in the post processing stages. For heights, we can select our stock top as the top height, then the stock bottom as the bottom height. We can also offset the bottom height by -0.5mm to ensure we cut all the way through our stock. In passes, we need to enable multiple passes, and we also like saving the finishing pass for the final pass to reduce machine time and for a smoother finish. And we can enable smoothing and feed optimization as we did previously.

It is important to ensure that each bit you are using is set to be a different tool number. This will allow for your CNC to change the tool automatically if it has an automatic tool changer like the Carvera, or allow for your machine to pause for manual tool changes if it does not. While the numbers you assign your tools do not need to match the ones we used, this is an important step that cannot be skipped.

After creating operations, it is always a good idea to simulate your tool paths to inspect how they will operate when manufacturing your project. This allows us to catch any possible mistakes before we manufacture our projects. To simulate all of your operations for the maze part, right-click on the setup in Fusion's browser, then press simulate.

Make any adjustments as needed, then press Post Process to create a machinable Gcode file. The NC program window will appear, and this is where you can ensure you are creating a file using your machines profile, as well as rename this file and ensure you are working in the correct units. Once all settings have been adjusted for your resources, press Post to save a Gcode file that can be sent to your machine.

Before we move onto manufacturing this part, we can prepare the clear cover for our maze much like how we prepared the maze part in the last few steps.

To create the clear cover for our maze, we need to make a new setup and select the cover part as the body for this setup, rather than the maze part as we did previously. We also want to select the top right corner as our stock box point, and we can adjust the stock settings like we did earlier in step 2.

To create the clear cover, we will have just two operations:

Drill Operation: The first operation for the cover is going to be a drilling operation using the 2mm drill bit (again set to tool #6). After creating this operation, we can select our bits and adjust the feed and speed settings based on the new material we are using. In the geometry tab, we want to select the four pilot holes to be drilled. In heights, we can select the stock top as our top height, and then the bottom of our holes as the bottom height. We can also enable a peck drilling operation so that we do not crack the acrylic while drilling.

2D Contour Operation: The second and last operation we need to make for the cover is another 2D contour to cut out the cover part from our stock. We will again use the 3.175mm x 12mm end mill (tool #4), and set the speed and feed settings as we did previously. In geometry, we need to select the bottom edge of the cover part as a chain. We then need to enable tabs to hold this part in place as we did previously. For heights, we can select our stock top as the top height, then the stock bottom as the bottom height. We can also offset the bottom height by -0.5mm to ensure we cut all the way through our stock. We can then adjust passes just like we did previously in step 3 for the maze part.

With the operations complete for the cover part of this project, we again want to simulate the tool paths to identify any errors or potential problems that might exist in our design. Once checked, we can export this job as a Gcode file using the Post Process window just like we did earlier in step 4 for the maze part.

This step will vary based on your CNC, but this step allows us to setup our CNC before machining our parts. We first need to secure the stock for our first part, which would be the epoxy tooling board for the maze, onto the bed of our CNC using a combination of top clamps, corner clamps, or edge clamps. As discussed earlier, we also want to put a piece of spoil board or waste material under the stock as we are cutting all the way through so that the bed of our CNC is protected. You can learn more about how to secure stock for CNC machines in this video.

If your machine has an Automatic Tool Changer like the Carvera, we need to load our bits into the tool change so that the order matches the numbering we set in Fusion earlier on. If your machine does not have an automatic tool changer you can load the first tool at this time.

You may also need to set the height and origin of your stock at this time depending on your CNC, but the Carvera will do this automatically in a later step.

Again, this might vary a bit based on your CNC, but this step allows us to load one of the Gcode files made previously and prepare it for manufacturing for our CNC. For both the Carvera and Carvera Air, this is done through the Carvera Controller App.

After launching the app, you can upload the Gcode file for the maze part to the internal storage disk on the Carvera via USB or WIFI connection. The file is stored locally on the machine (no cloud) so that a loss in connection will not impact the machining process.

Once the file has been loaded, we can open the Config & Run window to adjust the settings for this job, which includes:

• Set Work Origin - If the offsets were not set in Fusion earlier, you can adjust the position of the part on the bed manually here.
• Scan Margin - This will trace the perimeter of the machining area before machining begins with the Carvera's built in laser pointer. This should be enabled so you can be confident that your part will machine in the correct location, and that there will not be any collisions with clamps.
• Auto Z Probe - Enabling this will allow the Carvera to use its wireless probe (or wired for the Air) to automatically measure the height of your stock.
• Auto Z Align - If the stock is not square or flat, the Carvera and Carvera Air will automatically probe the surface of the stock for any deviations, then compensate for these deviations during the machining process. This is typically needed when working with warped stock, or when the surface of the stock is the final surface of the part as it is for the maze part.

Once all settings have been set based on your machine and material, you can press Run to start machining the maze part of the project.

After starting the job, your machine will work through machining maze part of this project based on the file we created earlier in Fusion. If you are using the Carvera or Carvera Air, the machine will start tracing the perimeter through a scan margin, before then probing the stock to measure the z height automatically. Alternatively, you could use a manual XYZ probe instead. And when enabled, the Carvera will also used the Auto Leveling feature to measure any deviations in the stock height for optimal machining.

The machine will then work through the different operations to cut our first part. If your machine has an automatic tool changer, tool changes will be done automatically between operations. Alternatively, your machine should pause and wait for you to change the tools between operations.

You should never leave a CNC unattended, and we always recommend working with a CNC that is fully enclosed and fitted with a dust collection system to ensure that you are machining in a safe working environment.

Once the job has finished, we can move onto machining the next part of the maze project, the clear cover.

To machine the cover, we are going to repeat steps 7, 8, and 9 for the second part of our maze project.

After securing the clear acrylic to the bed of your CNC, you can load or prepare the tools needed to machine the cover part. We intentionally used the same numbers for the bits in the maze part and cover part so we would not need to reload our automatic tool changer between parts.

In the Carvera Controller App, or the controlling software for your CNC, we can upload and prepare the Gcode file for the clear cover to be manufactured. Like with the maze part, we want to check and enable the following options in the Config & Run window:

• Set Work Origin - If the offsets were not set in Fusion earlier, you can adjust the position of the part on the bed manually here.
• Scan Margin - This will trace the perimeter of the machining area before machining begins with the Carvera's built in laser pointer. This should be enabled so you can be confident that your part will machine in the correct location, and that there will not be any collisions with clamps.
• Auto Z Probe - Enabling this will allow the Carvera to use its wireless probe (or wired for the Air) to automatically measure the height of your stock.
• Auto Z Align - If the stock is not square or flat, the Carvera and Carvera Air will automatically probe the surface of the stock for any deviations, then compensate for these deviations during the machining process. This is typically needed when working with warped stock, or when the surface of the stock is the final surface of the part as it is for the clear cover part.

We can then Run this part of the project as we did earlier with the maze part. The Carvera will again trace the perimeter of the design, as well as auto level and measure the Z height automatically. Once this part has finished, we can move onto the post processing stages of this project.

After our parts have finished machining, we can remove them from our CNC and cut off any tabs by carefully using a small hand saw or knife. You can also sand the area where the tabs were cut to create a smoother finish as needed.

To assembly the maze, we first want to insert the BB into the maze channel. We can then remove the protective film off of the clear acrylic piece before securing the clear cover to the maze part using small machine screws fixed through the pilot holes that we machined earlier.

Once assembled, you can enjoy this fun project by attempting to solve the maze!

CNC Machines like the Carvera and Carvera Air allow us to bring our ideas to life through different projects, like making a mini maze game! We love CNC's because of their versatility and speed. While we showed how this game could be made using epoxy tooling board and acrylic in this guide, we could have adjusted our bits, speeds, and feeds to have made it from carbon fiber, or Oak, or aluminum, all with the same design and the same machine.

But remember, working with CNC's can be hazardous if not done correctly. Always ensure you've check your design files for any errors, and that your stock is secured and bits are loaded correctly, as discussed in our getting started video for safe operation. Visit our YouTube Channel and Wiki Page for more how to's and guides for working with CNC's and creating projects like this one, and share what you made with us @Makera_Inc on our social channels!

Thanks for reading, and happy making!

Written by @MrErdreich and @Makera_Inc