hi all,
? want to make basic 2 axes cnc with adafruitmotor shield (l293D), what software do ? need and what will be the flowchart of the system? Thanks for kindly responses.
any help?
It helps if you provide a link to the motor shield that you have. Since you say it has the L293D chip, it must be the older Adafruit Motor Shield:
There is a library written by Adafruit to control it, at the link above.
I don't really like that shield, as it is not a chopper (PWM) driver. That means if they are 5V steppers, you use 5V to drive them, if they are 3V steppers, you must use a resistor of the appropriate value because that L293D chip (please use capital letters where appropriate, as lowercase "L" looks like a one) requires at least 5V for the motor supply. If they are 8V steppers, you must drive them with 8V.
And the steppers lose torque rather quickly when you speed them up.
I prefer the Pololu chopper stepper drivers, they use a higher voltage to drive the steppers, and regulate current with PWM automatically. Steppers driven in this way do not lose torque as quickly when you spin them faster. It is a simple matter of providing Step and Direction. I am working on driving a few steppers using them, I'm using the Blink Without Delay sketch as a starting point. However, I switched to micros() because millis() is too slow to use when driving stepper motors. That's not the only way to drive them, and probably not the best.
The newer Adafruit motor shield uses different, higher current chopper (PWM) chips.
thx for your advices polymorph,
I had googled alot and then find that to make a simple cnc with aafruit motor shield v1 we need to use a tiny gcode interpreter for arduino, the good thing is there are some nice guys that had wrote an interpreter for aruino uno R3 and some others :
i had tried that interpreter and it works fine with 2 cd rom steppers. (But you have to make some adjustments for the machine, especially the baudrate for g code sender, steps per revolution, steps per inch, stepper max. speed, there is something very important, the msg g code interpreter processes the g code which has a ":" character at the end of the line, ex: "G0 X120:" and every letter has to be uppercase.)
and the second program is the Gcode Sender for Windows by Otto Hermansson. thats all you need.
here is the link:
https://github.com/OttoHermansson/GcodeSender/downloads
Have fun if any questions for the system ? can help you to figure out.
here are the photos of the cnc with a simple laser mark
Hey Bass,
came across your post while looking for some drivers. You mentioned you used the CD drive steppers?? are these the ones you used?? http://images.elektroda.net/85_1309460292.jpg
If yes, could you help me out please 
I am making a 2 axis CNC as well but my Y axis stepper is over loaded , since I hacked these motors from old drives I dont have the data sheet to look at so I could check and reduce the weight on Y axis.
Would you know a supplier who sells these motors but also the datasheets please?
thanks in advance.