I was going to write more about making circuit boards using the little CNC mill today but as I was working on a new board design in KiCAD I got excited about my idea for a tiny, integrated, portable maching for making such things, SE/3D.
This was the start of today's post, but you can see it has strayed a bit...
I wrote about SE/3D last year a few years ago, and had hoped I might at least get it working as a 3D printer in time to go to the Midwest Reprap Festival. As usual, I got sidetracked/re-prioritized/etc. and didn't make a lot more progress after that post. Today I'm reinvigorated, partially by doing the sort of work I want to do on such a machine, but probably also due to some beautiful work I've seen lately by people recreating the SE/30, even building completely new machines.
I will admit that part of my passion for the SE/3D design comes from feelings I can't explain about the SE/30. Maybe it's simply nostalgia, but I think there's more to it than that. I didn't own one when it was "contemporary", I only worked on one occasionally while in school (most of my time there was spent inside Boarland Turbo C++ on a 386DX40). Years later I bought one off Ebay and used it to run an Internet site (DNS, Mail, Web) to prove it could be done, but it wasn't something I used for everyday work. Yet I've always been drawn to the machine, the form-factor, the operating system and it's applications...
So there is for sure something "romantic" about my desire to use that same form to build my personal universal fabrication machine.
Something I'm reconsidering for SE/3D is the operating system. By default I had assumed this would be some form of Linux, or maybe something new I create myself, but I'm wondering if in 2026, HaikuOS might be an option?
I love Haiku, and I think it would be a perfect fit for such a machine, but for a long time the only CPU it worked with was X86, and for many reasons I won't be using an X86 processor in SE/3D. But last year I started hearing that someone is working on getting Haiku running on RISC-V, and I just happen to have a nice little RISC-V SBC sitting on the workbench...
If that works, I would be very happy to base the machine on HaikuOS. Many of the tools I rely on in Linux run on Haiku (I don't completely understand how, but I'll take it) so I don't think application software will be a major barrier, and if it is well then I'll have an excuse to play with writing Haiku/BeOS software again I guess...
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026