DIY CNC Machine How Hard Can It Be?

I would go wit USB or serial. Parallel would be a pain, serial is not well supported by new PCs but is fairly well supported by USB devices. USB would be best, and you can get single-chip USB interfaces, but you're left with the responsibility for a Windows driver, even if all you're doing is using someone else's.

Yes, for all sorts of motors.

Yes, but you can learn it. Find out the differences between stepper, brushed DC, and brushless DC motors. I'd probably look at brushless DC motors, but if you want to roll your own driver life can get complicated.

Hopefully. If not, MPJA has generic switchers for not too much more.

Have a look at this

martin

Cool... piece of cake :)

Laser tables can sell for about $30000 CAD. I can probably make a crude CNC machine for maybe $2000.00 (including

I might do some practice first with some inkjet printer stepper motors.. Heck..I might be able to use 80% of the parts to make a mini CNC for practice before making a monster 8ft x 5ft table.

Anybody know if someone converted an inkjet printer into a CNC? D from BC

Try alt.machines.cnc and

It's a fairly common sort of temptation, and there's a good deal of experience available. Some aspects depend on things like need for speed (it's one thing to do something overnight, another to crank it out in 5 minutes) and another is how much you want to do the whole software end of it yourself, .vs. using someone else's software to save time on the "getting it functional" end. Yet another aspect is how big - things differ when you want to CNC with a 4 inch work area, .vs. 4 feet or 40 feet.

found this on teh internets

martin

I noticed the 1999 copyright..That's like 400years ago in techno time. :) So I looked over the motion control IC..Interesting.. It didn't take me long to see the learning curve .. arrrgh.. :( D from BC

Heyy...that GUI looks familiar.. I think I saw some guy on Youtube.com use it for his homemade CNC machine. D from BC

I'll make an effort to search for time savers...hopefully without taking too much time. :)

I'll check out alt.machines.cnc... My first post there could be "How Do I Build a CNC?" .

Too much? :) D from BC

At one time it was obvious. DOS, LPT, motor drivers, stepper motors. Write your own Breshenham routines and HPGL converters and have control over each and every step. Most of the cost was in the ball screws and mechanicals. With windows and USB, machine controlling is very difficult and most of the work has to be outsourced to bought in custom processors, controllers and software. Essentially you now have to rely on the skills of others whilst relegated to being just a consumer with deep pockets.

I sometimes program with Delphi and thought maybe I could just do all the processing on my PC and somehow spit out the positioning data via USB to the motor controllers.

But ...it's never that easy :) D from BC

Power supply would be the least of your concerns.

If you build them, we will take a couple (may be more).

Requirements:

1. Drill/Cut through 0.6 mm silicon wafers (150mm or 200mm).
2. Positioning within 0.01 mm.

Part suggestions: MC33486 - Dual High Side Bridge Driver STM32F103 - 32 bits ARM M3 uC w/ USB

Well..if I keep at it..maybe by 2009.. :( My mechanics design is not as good as my electronics design..

D from BC

rs232 is so easy to do, so many micros have it too, theres always usb to rs232 converters if you pc doesnt have one.

you can get very high resolution optical incremental encoders, if you want to roll your own you with a sloted disc and quadraturte opto, you could always use a micro's on board ADC and work out the position between slots.

you can get many motor driver chips wich accept logic input, microcontroller development boards are quite cheap on ebay.

big question is how to arrange the table slides and dirves, theres lots of options, linear round shafts, toothed flat linear guides etc, toothed belt drive, screw drive .. or you could have it polar type with rotating rather than sliding parts.

You can also get x/y slides to fit onto pilar drils to turn them into milling machines, just add motor drive/position sensing.

I hope your doing this for fun rather than to get something realy good at a low price.

Colin =^.^=

======================================== There are a couple threads on avrfreaks.net from microcontroller users that have built CNC machines for making pc boards.. they talk about their favorite Gecko controllers and motors etc.

We need them sooner, but there are always outsourcings.

You just need enough reduction gears to step down the motors.

Up to 50 microns (0.05mm) might be OK.

There will be existing patterns on the wafer to fine tune the position. You can turn it on with fractional power, check the position, then full power. A camera chip would be enough to read the positions.

Folks in the Seattle Robotics Society have done a whole bunch of stuff like this. Dan Mauch is one name I remember from Nuts&Volts magazine articles. Look to see if this stuff is up on the web, or in one of the web archives.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

Before reading any other replies: None of these interfaces support decent real time processing. CNC machining is a true real time situation. The power supply question is nearly irrelevant. Now where did that Ad for that fast CNC machine go to? Oh, just google fast CNC machines. Once you see what they can do you may get some clue as to what is required to build one from scratch.

The fundamental basic of USENET news is to read a few hundred posts (or a weeks worth) before posting. Google has consistently dismissed this as well as most other cannonical properties of USENET news. For a few years now they have treated us to lamers that think this is a bulleten board system (BBS), listserv, chat room or blog. Do you know what any of these are, or why they are different?

Oh defacation, how clueless can you be? Just buy pre-encoded strips. They are intended to be mounted on low TCE measurement reference bars. Then again they may no longer be generally available.