My first CNC machine Arduino Mega controlled!!!!

I love this! A home-made CNC machine is pretty much my golden chalice project.

NEW CABLE ARRAY AND CUT TEST

What do you plan to use it for primarily? I want to mill PCBs with mine, and eventually make a full Reprap machine.

will do the same as you............ did you Make yours?

REDESIGNING Z AXIS

Very impressive. My original attraction to the Arduino was for some machine control projects.

Did you write your own stepper motor code or are you using one of the libraries?

How do you "home" the system when it first powers up?

Tim

Did you design the stepper drivers yourself? Can you tell some more about them?

I'm about 1/2 way through construction and have most of the mechanical parts rounded up, I'm trying to take my time and get the tolerances as close as possible. I think when I'm done and I've got it up, running and have wrapped my brain around the whole concept I'm going to design my own version. I can already think of a few improvements over the original Repstrap design, and I've been wanting to try my hand at metal casting so that'll probably come into play.

Looking good!

Super

Please document your project :stuck_out_tongue:

yes, please bring some more photos or a video. very good project

i made my own stepper drivers using this from arduino page...

it works really fine

Cool! I'd love to see a video as well :)!

Question: Is there any specific benefit to using stepper motors instead of gear head motors and rotational sensors? I have a few gear head motors, but no steppers.

Ooo, and I found a bag of 8 hall effect limit switches in the garage! (courtesy of my grandfather's estate) STOKE! :smiley:

if you are interested in the arduino code enter here: hbridge arduino gcode interpreter download | SourceForge.net

i think the easy way to do the cnc machine is to have a look at the reprap people and study the way they interfaced the arduino on it.... in my case i didn´t have the stepper drivers so i made my own with the arduino.cc circuit....

then we noticed the reprap people used for drivers the step/dir format on the firmware, so we erased the extrusioner codes and aded some mods to the "do step" function....

so, now it works very good with my drivers that uses two pins on arduino for each stepper...

new machine on the make....

I think you need some more stuff on that table. I can still see the table in a couple of places.

Looks like my work bench, except with less clutter ;D

Does the power cord on the tool cause any drag/weight problems? Because of that issue I was thinking of using a cordless on mine and hard-wiring it to a power supply, I figure that cord should be lighter and more flexible than a typical 120v

clutter is the mark of a true genius.

working on my own cnc... so far i've got one a test setup running one axis. How did you get around the "i can only move one stepper at a time" issue? is it a choppy movement?

This is very cool!
I want to make a 3d printer, I'm thinking I'll attempt it after college applications are done!