writing my own software for cnc controlling???

Other Hardware Motors, Mechanics, Power and CNC
1

hi everybody,

a few month ago i decided to build my own cnc machine. actually i started as a complete newby but i got some programming experience.
i found a conection for matlab, so for now im planning on using this live connection to matlab which simplifies the hardware conections.

i want to draw autocad files( since i got experience in that aswell) save theese files to *.dxf ; get them interpretated in matlab and calculate the coordinates for the 3 steppers to go.

in my mind it does seem realizable but i would like to heart your opinions. am i reinventing the wheel? the first goal is to make it as cheap as possible and to learn as much as i can by doing it.

for more info just ask

2

pongo:
in my mind it does seem realizable but i would like to heart your opinions. am i reinventing the wheel?

Perhaps just a bit... :stuck_out_tongue: Seriously though, there are a lot of information and options available for you to look at. An Arduino would be a good choice for interefacing between the mechanical and digital worlds required by this project, but there are a lot of ways to effectively do this. If you want to develop your own variation that's fine, but I would still take a look at what others are doing for inspiration and instruction.

3

In the Spanish section there is a very nice thread about building a CNC machine, both the mechanical + the electronics and control SW.

Mechanical and a bit of electronics:
http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,87714.0.html
The first few pages are a bit more about runting about the CNC, then it gets interesting with pictures and electronics.

Electronics:
http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,112729.0.html
A few demo videos of the developed electronics and some cool pictures.

SW to control the electronics described in the threads, well it can control most CNC electronics base on modern stepper drivers:
https://bitbucket.org/fmalpartida/cnc-controller/downloads

The SW is nothing more than a gcode interpreter that executes gcode and converts them into stepper movements.