Hi, been manually duplicating my carvings using a jig I came up with, but I'm looking to see if it is feasible to use arduino to control one or 2 axis's and save wear & tear on my carved masters.
Not sure if links are permitted for new members, but here is a link to one of my contraptions:
If one could integrate arduino and a couple steppers/servos, how would you approach it?
Thank you everyone, the information shared here is fantastic.... back to reading 4 me.
Searching this forum and the old forum below for CNC will probably produce a couple days worth of reading on the subject.
Thanks for the quick reply,
I'm trying to avoid full cnc integration, as all of 2 years of research into machining centers and cnc lathes has done nothing but give me migraines 
I saw a project earlier from a gentleman who used a servo to record and playback movement by tapping into the center output of the servo pot.
Well, what you're trying to accomplish IS CNC integration whether you do it with a computer or an Arduino. 
You're only having to deal with 2 axes though which makes it a bit easier. Steppers are definitely the way to go. Hobby servos are not up to the task (unless you are talking about real servo motors with encoders). I've been following various projects such as RepRap and others that use Arduinos as stand-alone CNC controllers and really have not understood the point of it since it's so darned easy to use a PC and well developed software such as Mach3 or EMC2. (I use EMC2 on a 10 year old PC I got for free). I guess it's the challenge but if you're really interested in doing real work with your machine it doesn't make sense to me.
But your machine looks great and I don't see it taking much to add steppers to your setup. The only difficulty I can see is generating the G-code file. That would require a 3d modeling program and/or a digitizing probe. It would be interesting to see how that guy uses a servo to record the motion.
Thanks for the input, I found that project:
Using the pot on the servos is something I have difficulty to understand....
Why not just use :
a: a regular pot linked to your machine?
b: if you're using a servo,and an arduino,why not send a get position command as included in the library? this way you would know whenever you want where is your servo at and still no need of another wire back to the arduino XD
lordzeppo:
b: if you're using a servo,and an arduino,why not send a get position command as included in the library? this way you would know whenever you want where is your servo at and still no need of another wire back to the arduino XD
Excellent, can the same be done with the stepper library (eg; get position)?
Ultimately, I'd like to run the master once, recording the positions, saving the positions to memory, then play them back.
The main thing is to (like previously mentioned) avoid traditional 3D modeling, as these masters are hand carved.
If I could 3D model, I'd look for a 4th (rotary) Axis machine and produce from digital.
Thank you everyone for the insight, keep it comin.