The Makera Carvera touts itself as a beginner-friendly CNC milling machine capable of carving through woods, plastics, brass, and aluminium, all while keeping a compact desktop footprint that still offers a highly capable 360 by 240 millimeter work area. But what makes it beginner-friendly and why did it smash its Kickstarter funding goal 17 times over? In this video, we're going to be taking an overview of the Carvera and breaking down its features to answer those questions. Also, we are going to be assuming that you've never touched a milling machine in your life, and we're going to be breaking down this beginner machine for beginners. So let's get started.

Over the last few years, there's been a bit of an arms race to take complex desktop machinery that once required a great deal of experience to operate and simplify it to a point where it's as plug and play as a household appliance and just as easy to use. Companies such as Bamboo Labs have been playing a big part doing this to the 3D printing space. X-Tool is currently trying to do it to laser cutters, but there is a third horseman of this complex desktop machinery apocalypse: CNC mills, which are easily the most involved, most unforgiving, and least beginner-friendly of the three. And that problem feels like what the Makera is trying to solve with the Carvera. Now, it's not as easy as using a modern 3D printer yet, but it's getting close.

So what do you get with the Carvera and what does it actually mean in terms of the beginner user experience with this thing? First of all, the biggest flex of this machine is the auto tool changer. At the time of making this video, the Carvera is one of, if not the cheapest CNC mill you can buy with this feature. It's got six tool slots that you can load your milling bits into, and the machine swaps them out as needed during the cutting job. Really simple.

Without this, you would need to manually get in there and use a wrench to swap out the bit and then re-zero the Z-axis every time. Essentially, you need to let the machine know where the tip of the tool is now that you've changed it, because it's probably changed height slightly. Now, that is not a difficult process. With a bit of practice, it's easy to learn how to do that. Realistically, you're saving a little bit of time, but you're doing maybe two to possibly five tool swaps every cutting job.

But this does introduce one extra thing for beginners to learn and also adds one moving part to this whole system. It also opens up a small chance of something going wrong. Maybe you don't re-zero the height of the bit correctly. Now, that's just one thing, but CNC milling has a lot of these little friction points that add up to make the complicated and not very beginner-friendly process it is. Also, don't forget that if you do some of these things wrong, you might be breaking a bit on top of all of this.

Again, the auto tool change just removes this one moving part, but that's kind of the thing of the Carvera. It's not one major thing this machine does that makes it easy to use. It's all of these little problems that it solves together at once that kind of removes a lot of the barriers. These things are easy to learn. Juggling one ball is easy, but you throw a dozen of these at a beginner and they're not going to have a good time.

For example, in the tool changer, there's also a wireless probe that the machine uses to tap the surface of the material to perform auto leveling. Even if the material looks flat, it's probably not going to be. And this probe gets an idea of how flat it exactly is, sort of like what most modern 3D printers do with their auto bed leveling. This is going to help you with just general cutting and engraving accuracy overall. But if you're making PCBs, this is going to be a massive help as during the process you're only going to be milling a tiny thin little layer of copper off the top of the board.

Any alignment issues will make you mill too deep or not deep enough on this tiny thin little layer. The Carvera also has some nice bespoke kits for PC manufacturing, if that's up your alley. And with a bit of ingenuity, you can also mill two layer PCBs as well. Also, just a nice little touch on that wireless probe. It's got a little laser pointer on the end that it will use to trace out where it's about to cut.

This is really helpful for seeing if you're going to run a tool through a clamp or somewhere it's not meant to be by accident. Related, but don't mix them up, the Carvera also comes with a proper 2.5 watt diode laser module, allowing you to do things such as engrave an image on wood. Some people might not ever use this, but it's just nice to have in a machine and all in one with one software solution. Another feature of the Carvera is its fully enclosed frame.

CNC mills cut away at a material one tiny little slice at a time, which produces a lot of dust and chips. That 200 watt spindle screaming it up to 15,000 RPM while chewing through a block of aluminium is going to get loud. The Carvera has a fully enclosed frame with a big ABS polycarb lid and seals to help keep all of this inside. The mess largely stays inside and we usually see about 65 decibels thrown around in terms of loudness. It's also got a dust collector built into it.

Any CNC machine you will run probably needs a dust collector, both to help with preventing dust and mess, but also to give you a cleaner cut. Long story short, when you cut away a little chunk of your material, you want it to be ejected away to somewhere else. There are a lot of reasons for this, too many for this video, but a dust collector helps here. Most mills have an external vacuum to achieve this, but having one built into the machine is nice and it's suitable enough for most jobs.

For our use case, we did opt for the external Makera Cyclone as we think it just kind of helps with dust suppression a bit better. We really wanted to keep our workshop really, really clean though. Regardless, with the enclosed frame and built-in dust collector, it means that this machine isn't too messy and can be run inside like other desktop machines you might have. You don't need a dedicated space in the shed for it or something like that.

While we're talking about frame stuff, the Carvera's gantry or motion system is pretty darn good for a desktop machine. Essentially, it's using something in the more industrial tier and it's a big step up from the belt systems and whatnot that you would find in cheaper kit machines. Additionally, it uses closed loop servo motors to drive the X, Y and Z movement. In other machines that don't have this, if the cutting bit is pushed too hard or maybe it meets a bit of resistance somewhere, the motor might stall or skip a step and the machine won't know this.

So it will keep cutting, but with everything slightly off course. With a closed loop system, there is a sensor letting the motors know exactly where they are and how much they've traveled so it can correct for these issues by itself. This near industrial gantry and motor system means that you get a nice level of accuracy in your machining and you can produce some nice and detailed or small parts. Now what's a machine without the software to actually support and run it?

You are going to need two bits of software to run this thing. A CAM software to turn your 3D model or 2D vector file into G-code, which is a series of machine instructions telling your machine how to move and cut out your part. And you also need a Carvera controller, the bit of software that runs on a computer or mobile device plugged into the machine. This reads the G-code and feeds the instructions to the machine. It actually tells the machine what to do.

Carvera Controller is good. We didn't have any issues with it and we found it a pretty straightforward experience. Makera CAM on the other hand, well, it's easy to use, but it's known to be a bit buggy and to crash. So save often because you might need to restart it. We didn't run into too many issues with small and simple jobs though.

Makera does have a brand new CAM software on the way called Makera Studio, which looks really promising both in terms of fixing bugs and simplifying the CAM process even more. That's expected to launch in the months following this video's release. If you already have a license for Fusion 360, you can use that as your CAM solution. Carvera does have an officially supported profile, which it also has for VCarve Desktop and Kirimoto if they float your boat as well.

So without getting into too much of the nitty gritty of Makera CAM, it's easy because you are walking through a guided path and ecosystem. You select the material you're cutting with and set its size. Then you load your 3D model or 2D vector file. Then you just select a feature of it and tell the machine how you want it to cut it out.

This is a little bit more involved than something such as slicing a model for 3D printing, but it is really easy to learn. Now, there are a lot of settings that you have to tell your machine for each of these cuts, such as how fast to spin the bit, how fast to feed the bit through the material and at what depth, how fast to plunge the bit downwards, lots of things like this. But the bits that come with the machine and the bits you can buy from Makera already have profiles that have all of these calculated variables for you.

When you get confident, you might need to adjust these from time to time. But for most jobs, you're just cutting metal, you get that metal cutting bit and it handles all the numbers for you. And of course, if you want to use other bits from any other manufacturer, you can still use them. Usually they'll have a profile or a set of numbers that you can use as well.

Once you've told the machine how to cut out all of your features of your thing, you just export it and run it on the machine. It's pretty straightforward. Okay, there is probably a little bit more involved than that. But overall, it is a pretty easy process to learn and it is pretty beginner friendly.

Also, from what we've seen with Makera Studio, which is about to release, it looks to simplify that even more, probably three or four buttons to be pressed between loading a model and getting it ready to be cut. All right, we should wrap it up here. But just some rapid fire dot points that help make this machine easy to use. It comes almost ready out of the box.

There's just a few screws and mounts you've got to undo. It also comes with a good amount of tools and materials to get started. It has this anchored system where you line up your material with this corner L bracket so that the machine knows where your material is. And this saves you having to manually do it yourself.

It's got demo projects ready to go to help you use the machine for the first time. And probably one of the biggest things that we've omitted until now, Makera has a ton of tutorials online on how to use the machine and their software. So it is possible to teach yourself how to use this thing. Yes, again though, it is not as simple as using something such as a modern 3D printer, but that's because those have gotten incredibly simple.

But it is riding this wave of beginner friendly machines. And I think it's gotten CNC machining to the point where an absolute beginner who's never touched it at all in their lives can get going if they are willing to learn. For comparison, in terms of difficulty, I'd probably put a modern 3D printer at a 1.5 out of 10 on the how hard it is to learn scale. A modern desktop laser cutter probably at a 3 or 3.5.

And a Carvera, I'd probably put that at about a 4.5 out of 10. However, a regular desktop CNC machine that isn't trying to ride this wave of beginner friendliness, I would probably put that at a 7 or 8 out of 10. And I think that is a good idea to end this whole video on. CNC machining is not the easiest process, just due to the inherent nature of it, but this is about as easy as it gets.

If you have any questions about the Makera Carvera, head on over to our community forums and post about it there. We're all makers over there and we're happy to help. Until next time though, happy making.