CNC mill with Arduino and CNC Shield via USB on PC - now cutting the cord!

Projects General Guidance
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Hello,

I am very new to Arduino and its coding. However I threw myself in at the deep end and started building a CNC maching relying on Arduino Uno V3, CNC shield and drivers. I digged myself into GRBL, gcodes etc. Not deep, just a bit. So after having finished the first step, my machine runs fine with a PC generating gcode, sending it to Arduino via USB and the machine starts milling. Amazing how well it went so far.

So I want to take the next step: Standalone CNC - as currently a noisy and dust developing mill in my PC room isn't the best choice, I want to get it into the basement and perform its task without another laptop or PC connected via short range USB (that would be my less favorized choice).

As there are SD Card-, Wifi-, Ethernet-circuit boards to attach to Arduino I would like to let my PC still do the gcode generation and send it via Wifi, cable or even carry a SD Card myself to the CNC mill.

However I got not the faintest idea where to start and how to do it, I have a really hard time not being overwhelmed by all the info and picking the right. I checked a few tutorials, but honestly I don't want to go through lots of lessons on how to turn on a LED or make the buzzer sound. I don't want to do major programming myself, I would like to use dedicated libraries that are especially programmed for "how to get gcode into Arduino and let it start CNC" - perhaps even with a LCD.

My question is: **Can anybody who did a similar project provide some links or give me a helping hand?**Like "read that and you will understand!"? As mentioned...currently I don't know where to begin and I am asking for the right path to go. I understood how to upload programs into Arduino, add libraries etc and will probably understand some code, but am far away from writing my own.

1 Like
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but am far away from writing my own.

That is your big problem.
When projects get this complex even the writeups get complex and less detailed.

I think you need an SD card interface and some sort display for menu selection. Then you need to read the SD card which contains you Gcode files and feed them to the same place as your existing input.

don't want to do major programming myself

Look at the 3D printing web sites, like the repRap site, as that is very similar to a CNC router. Remember it is a bad idea to leave these sort of things unattended.

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Consider using a Pi attached to the CNC machine. Your PC can send a file over wifi and you can use something like UGS to have the Pi talk to the Uno. Might be less work than having the Uno do it all.

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Thanks to both of you. I think I will give the Raspberry a try, it looks promising and with the web based Chilipeppr CAM it seems to fit my needs quite well!