cnc

Xcarve and Fusion 360 CAD/CAM

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xcarve2   It has been bout a year now since I last had a chance to play with my CNC machine, so I figured I’d give an update on the progress so far and what I’ve learned.

Hardware:

Firstly, I got the Dewalt 611 router and router mount. This is a huge upgrade from the no-name dremel knock-off I had. After test cutting just once with the old router, the brushes were shot. I sprung for a real tool instead of a toy.  As a bonus, it makes the machine look nicer as well.  In order to fit 1/8″ shank bits, I had to get a 1/8″ collet for the DW611. This wasn’t terribly expensive if you compare the cost to replacing all of my router bits with 1/4″ bits.  I got all of this late summer 2015 and literally had only enough time to attach it all to my machine before life got crazy busy. I never even had a chance to test it until now.

I also recently got the Suck-It from kickstarter. This goes a LONG way into keeping dust to a minimum. A warning, however, I tightened the screw too tightly on my Suck-it and accidentally drove the bottom edge into one of my makerslide rails since I don’t have endstop switches. This  promptly shattered the Suck-it acrylic into incredibly sharp shards.  While you can purchase additional parts from the Suck-it website, I opted to make my own replacements from wood, which is a bit more forgiving.This also gave me a great chance to finally learn some CAD software.

While testing, I finally realized that the ACME screw inventables sent me last year as part of my upgrade kit is warped. It binds in a couple of places when I try to move the Z-axis up all the way.  I thought that I  could fix this by simply getting a stronger motor, so I ordered the NEMA 17 from inventables. This was stronger, but still couldn’t overcome the bend in the screw. The bend also causes the very tip of my bits to wobble ever so slightly. It is almost imperceptible, but makes a big difference when I mill multiple passes of the same shape or try to do PCBs.I contacted Inventables and Mo in customer service worked with me over a couple of weeks to get my Z working great. It turns out that Since I upgraded from Shapeoko1—> Shapeoko2–> Xcarve, I had the wrong spacers on my router mount.  The ones I had were about 2mm too short. Mo helped me get the right length spacers (9.5mm long) and bolts(35mm). My short spacers and bolts were causing the ACME screw to bend back towards the gantry at a significant angle. When installing the new spacers, be sure not to use washers as this will also change the angle of the ACME screw.  With the new spacers installed I can get all but 7mm of my Z axis working perfectly smoothly.  Thanks Mo!

I also bought this clear tube for my suck-it vacuum mount. This was about 63mm in diameter, so I had to same the interior of the acrylic suck-it plate to fit the tube. I also cut it to about 9 or 10 inches in length. At this height, the tube is about the height of the router itself. This gives me more visibility to see what is going on with the business end of my router rather than the black coupling tube that the suck-it came with.

CAD/CAM:

I wanted to learn a real CAD package since my FabAcademy training in 2014.  I only had experience with Sketchup which, while very good for beginners, it doesn’t really follow the same kind of workflow as professional engineering CAD/CAM packages. I wanted to learn something along those lines. I had played with Creo, Solidworks, Antimony, and was looking into Rhino/Grasshopper when I saw Fusion 360. Autodesk has been going crazy buying and building awesome CAD/CAM tools for the hobby market as well as for industry.  Fusion 360 is a complete engineering tool that can start with a 2D sketch or a 3D body and allow a user to create objects, render them realistically, stress test them with finite state analysis, and export 3D print or CNC toolpaths.  Oh, and did I mention that it is free and has a very active community online as well?  So I downloaded it and gave it a try. I am quite pleased with it in all respects!

Having no formal training, I opted to take some free online courses from Udemy.com. Check out my other posts concerning that. Of course, as with anything, beginning is the toughest part. It took me a couple of days to get the hang of the Fusion 360 workflow, but with all the great tutorials and videos online, it is easy to find answers to your questions. If not, you can post to Autodesk’s forum for help.

Moving on, I played with Fusion 360 starting with the 3D sculpt method at first to get some awesome organic shapes, then moved to learning the 2D sketch workflow. I measured my machine and aluminum rails of the Suck-it. I made quite a few mistakes along the way, and had to start over several times, but I finally figured out how to get what I wanted  out of the software. It is still a bit buggy from time to time and crashed a few times when I tried to do certain things, but I think it was partially due to a bad design.  I watched a couple videos and fixed my design and was able to create the toolpaths without further issue.

Fusion 360 can do 2D and 3D milling jobs with ease. There are a lot of options, but videos mentioned in my previous post cover most of what you need to know. I’m running a smoothieBoard on my machine and Fusion 360 has a CAM processor script designed for my board, so I simply select “Smoothie” from the dropdown menu when I go to export my design and I’m good to go.

Sending the job to the machine:

The main software people are using to send jobs to the smoothieboard is Pronterface, which is typically used for 3D printing. It’s all Gcode, so it doesn’t really matter, but for some reason, I didn’t like using a 3D printing software for CNC. Last year I tried using Universal G-code Sender with the smoothie and even played with coding in this ability, but life got too busy for me to continue, so I stuck with using Pronterface. What I like about Pronterface is the ability to create custom buttons. For example, I made buttons to zero the axes, reset the smoothieBoard after I hit the killswitch, etc.  These prevent me from having to manually type the Gcode in the command window. I can even send smoothie console commands using these buttons.

pronterface buttons

You can also run the smoothieboard over ethernet. You can do so through pronterface or by using one of several web interfaces (meaning you can control your 3dprinter or CNC machines over the web). This is useful in my FabLab at work where we have a lot of 3D printers running on a 3D print server. You can run the smoothieboard on this as well. It can host several different web interfaces which I hope to go into later, but one of them is basically a webpage that looks just like pronterface.

I feel like I finally have a good workflow here. You can see my results here. I made replacements of the broken acrylic pieces of my suck-it dust boot that I made in Fusion 360. I used scrap wood, so it had quite a few drill holes going all the way through it already. I also did conventional only, and no climb milling which would have given a nicer finish.  I used a 2-flute straight 1/8″ but as well, no spiral which would have also given me a cleaner result.  Due to my learning curve, I did have to do some manual touch ups to the dimensions of the pocket which explains the nastiness in there you see. suckit

 

 

Using Fusion 360 for CNC and 3D Printing

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Many designers use some kind of computer-aided design or CAD software to make 2D and 3D designs. A common one used by many people is Rhino (especially when used in conjunction with the Grasshopper plugin).  Fusion 360 is a newer, easy to use, free complete CAD/CAM package. If you are going to learn any CAD software for practically any purpose (designing, engineering, fabrication, rendering realistic models, etc) it should be Fusion 360.

Fusion 360 is an Autodesk application that can do many useful things for designers. Whether you want to do something as simple as making cool looking 3D models to stress testing (finite element analysis) and even simulating the simple physics of designs and even milling them out or 3D printing them, Fusion 360 has you covered. It can also render realistic materials and surfaces and make animations of your working mechanical devices. Did I mention that it is free and there are tons of free online video tutorials and classes showing you how to use it with example projects? Oh, and so you aren’t reinventing the wheel (or other simple hardware) you can bring in models directly from McMaster-Carr who carry all sorts of nuts, bolts, gears, chains, etc. which can save you loads of time. This is my brain dump for getting started with Fusion 360 and using it with my CNC machine and my wife’s 3D printer.

Download Fusion 360 for free license. They have yearly licenses for hobbyist and I think even small business, or you can get a 3 year license for education.

Learning to use CAD:

At this point, there are two methodologies to use when creating parts in Fusion 360. If you have CAD experience already, you might be more comfortable drawing 2D parts then extruding them into 3D, etc.  If this is you, then check out this free training class.  The second methodology is sculpting. It begins with simple 3D shapes you can manipulate almost as if it were made of clay.  This is great for 3D smooth shapes. Check out this great free training class for this methodology after taking the first section of this class. These two methodologies don’t replace one another, rather they compliment each other. You will eventually need both for complex designs, but start with whichever one is easiest for you so you can progress quicker. I personally love the “sculpting” mode.

Since on a CNC machine, the Z axis is the one you attach the router to, you will need to change the position of the Z axis in Fusion 360. Then set your preferences such that Z axis is the top axis. Within Fusion 360, click your name at the top right->Preferences. In the main window that pops up, about half way down, there is a “Top Axis” option that is set to Y, change this to Z and then “Apply” Now Z is the top axis like on your CNC machine. This will work for all NEW documents, but if you happen to have an older design or are importing someone else’s design, there’s a couple different ways to change the Z axis.  The simplest method is to select the up-axis when you “setup the job” in Fusion 360. This is done when you are finished with your model design, and want to start creating the toolpaths.

Now, get into making some stuff. While Fusion 360 can do 2D and 3D designs and generate toolpaths for the CNC machine, there are lots of simpler (dumber) 2D workflows out there that are great such as Makercam.com or Easel from Inventables, etc. I’d use Fusion for more complicated 2D and 3D designs. For example, Easel won’t allow you to use a chamfer bit or V bit for engraving last I checked, but Fusion 360 will. This can make some amazing 2D designs.

You will notice that some of the videos tell you to delete certain lines in the generated Gcode from Fusion. This is mostly because it adds a “home” command and many DIY CNC machines don’t have homing switches. This command might tell your machine to go to the maximum extent of your machines to find the switches, but since you have no switches, it’ll end up messing up something.  So many of the tutorials suggest removing the G28 (home) line from the Gcode Fusion 360 generates.  If you have a smoothieboard controller, you should be fine to leave it in as long as you have set up your config files correctly.

How to set your origin to a different are of the design for milling. The best setup is one like the Othermill uses which ensures you never cut into your spoilboard. “Don’t spoil the spoilboard” is a great explanation of this method. I hope to make vids on how to in fusion 360 and real machine.

Can export to Othermill, or Smoothieboard, pocket NC, or other mill. Tons of options in the “Post Processing” menu.

You can simulate the milling process. When you do, the paths have different colors. A post on Autodesk’s forum cleared up what they mean:

  • Yellow: it indicates the rapid move of the toolpath
  • Green: it indicates the lead-in/leadout of the toopath (Lead-in is a cut used to make a smooth transition into the actual cut you want)
  • Red: it indicates the Ramping move of the toolpath
  • Blue: Most part of the toolpath are blue which indicates the cutting.
  • Orange: Is no-engagement stay down linking motion for Adaptive Cleating. Or motion updated when using the Feed Optimization feature.

Here’s my video of an example project I made. It is full of tips on stumbling blocks I came across.

CNC Bottle Opener

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bottleOpener6bottle-Open4A good friend of mine celebrated his birthday recently, and I  wanted to make him somethingon a CNC machine as a gift.  My friend brews beer and is an avid cyclist. In fact, his beer is on tap at the local bike shop.  I Figured the best gift would be a customized bottle opener with a few symbols of his interest engraved into the handle.

First, I ordered the Bottle Opener kit from Inventables.com.  I had seen the project online and assumed this kit included the raw parts I could CNC, but instead, the parts were already milled out.  I just had to engrave them and apply a finish to the wood before screwing the wooden parts onto the steel plate.

My wife is great at graphics so I asked if she would draw up something nice for me.  I wanted each wooden piece of the handle to have an image on both sides so my friend would be able to choose what he wanted the handles to display.  My wife gave me 4 good designs to use: one of just my friends name, the other with the word “Brewmaster”  a third with a bicycle with my friend’s initials embedded in the wheels, and finally a logo of the beer my friend brews for the bike shop.  You can see some of those original images below.

bikeLogoSouthMainIPA

I would need to mill a pocket in some scrap wood exactly the size of the wooden blanks of the bottle opener, stick the blanks into the pocket, and then mill out the designs.  This was much tougher than I realized.

 

The DXF file template from inventables of a the original bottle opener was not the same size as the actual wood blanks, so I had to break out the calipers and scale everything up. Secondly, nothing about the wooden blanks was standard.  Each one was a slightly different size and the holes for the screws were in different places.

The process is fairly simple. Take the SVG files of the designs, then import them in some CAM software which will also ask for the size of the endmill (drill bit thingy) and plan a path in XYZ coordinates to mill out the design in the SVG file.  There’s lots of different software out there. A good (but slightly pricy) one is Vcarve. There are others out there as well including some free and open source tools. A good free one is Makercam.  You can actually download makercam to your computer and use it like a regular program, even though it runs in your browser.  Another very simple CAM software is Easel which is made by the people over at inventables. They have lots of projects you can download directly to Easel as well with full settings.  I recommend you doublecheck feedrates, bit size and all that before actually using the designs though.

When I made the toolpaths for this design I used a 1/64th inch endmill to mill pockets for everything, including the text.   I chose this bit because it was small enough to fit into all of the detailed parts of the designs.  I used a pass depth of 0.1 inches, stepover of 0.0061 (which is about 39%).  For my spindle speed, I set it to 12,000rpm with a feedrate and plunge rate both set at 1 inch/minute.  

I placed a wooden blank in the pocket I had previously milled in the scrap board on the machine and began milling the “Brewmaster” design.  It is important to note here that since milling the pocket in the scrap board, I never turned off the CNC machine. This allowed me to keep the same Zero position for my X and Y coordinates between each milling.  If I changed this, then none of the designs would line up correctly with the wooden blanks.    After the first design was milled I realized the design template from inventables was really wrong about where the holes for the screws had been drilled.  So I scaled the design down and tried again.  Luckily I bought 2 of the bottle opener kits, so I had extra parts to use in case of a disaster like this.

bottle-Open2

After about 5 hours of milling, everything was finished. I had to go in and manually clean up the edges of the cuts a little with a razor knife and sand paper. Then I rubbed on a few coats of linseed oil to protect the wood.  Any food-safe finish can be used such as Mineral oil or Olive oil, but I happened to have linseed oil in the garage.  I forgot to take pictures of the final product, but you can see what one of the blanks looks like. I did both sides of each wood blank, each with a different design so he could flip them around.      

bottle-Open5 bottle-Open3
The final result looks great, however I mentioned that I had bought 2 of these bottle opener kits from inventables.  I kept the other one and after opening about 3 bottles, the metal bent. inventables obviously didn’t use a high grade steel for the opener which is a shame. My buddy probably had the same problem but was too polite to mention it to me.  Here’s a shot of mine after I bent the steel back straight. I also didn’t brush mine with oil so it isn’t as nice looking.
bottleOpener6

I just bought a GlowForge laser cutter and here’s why

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UPDATE 2017: I canceled my order for the Glowforge as life happens and I couldn’t afford to let them earn interest on my money anymore. I just had to get my money back for life reasons. I do still recommend you get one if you can. I’ve seen them in use in person at Charlotte Latin FabLab and it is really awesome!

Original article below:

So for the last 7 years or so, Jess and I have considered purchasing a laser cutter.  My personal goal is to have my own FabLab. I’m partially there with Jess’s KNK Zing vinyl cutter and my Shapeoko/Xcarve CNC machine.  The two main missing components are a 3D printer and a laser cutter.  Being a FabAcademy alum and running a FabLab at work, I am intimately aware that lasers are the most used (and arguably useful) machine. They are definitely the most fun to play with.  They are also the easiest to make money with (It’s always easiest for me to justify big purchases with the expression “hobbies that pay”). For the past several decades, laser cutters or laser engravers have been used in trophy shops and all sorts of companies. You can use a laser cutter to make products to sell on Etsy (as many people do), make the most amazing personalized birthday and holiday gifts, prototypes of ideas you have, or just make cool stuff for yourself.

I recently saw a new laser cutter on the market and I held back for a while before making the decision to buy it. That may have been a mistake.  The GlowForge is shaping up to be a great machine. I’ve followed it since September, when they were offering 50% discounts on all models.  At the time of this article, they have raised the price to 40% off retail price. And, if you use this referral code, both you and I will get $100 off our orders! (In full discretion, I have had no contact with Glowforge, nor have I actually use the machine myself yet. I’m just really stoked with this machine and its potential. I do have a PhD in Computer/Electrical engineering with Computer Science background and I run an official node of the FabLab network that was started at MIT, so hopefully I’m not off base here… )

There are lots of cheap ( <$15k ) 40-watt laser cutters on the market such as some cheap Chinese ones from Alibaba, or Full Spectrum.  So why go in on a Glowforge?  Well quite simply, it is the best designed laser cutter for FabLab/Makerspace/Hackerspace use. Unlike others in the price range, you don’t need a 5 gallon bucket of distilled water and a fish pump to cool the laser tube (yes that’s a real thing some other models at these prices require and it is ridiculous). It breaks the paradigm of how users interact with a laser cutter.  It is following some of the latest research on user interface and user experience in the field of computer science.  Honestly, those are project I wish I could implement myself but didn’t have the time. It brings together lots of great solutions from these projects and crams it all into a single package.

Paradigm shift #1:   Unlike traditional laser cutters, where you print to the machine like a printer on a network or connected to your computer, Glowforge can be printed from practically any location in the world. This is because the software is cloud-based.  I used to be wary of this kinds of thing, but since Glowforge also promises to make a version of the software open source, you can implement it yourself if you want.

Paradigm shift #2: Glowforge allows you to easily position your designs on your material using a live camera view of the material.  This is a godsend for those who are familiar with the waste of laser cutters.  To be able to make sure a design will fit on a scrap piece of material, you have to do some measurements, hold your tongue just write when pushing the cut button, and hope you remembered to reset the origin (0,0 point) on the laser before cutting.  Sometimes this can be very hard depending on what was originally cut out of the scrap you are using, you might have a weird shaped area and it can be very hard to find out if you can use it to cut a new part.  There are some ideas being researched to handle this kind of situation and other tools you can purchase that are very expensive, but Glowforge has it built in. Being able to literally move my design on top of a video camera image of the material allows me to use as much material as possible without the risk of mis-cutting and having to toss that piece of material and grab a new one.

Another great feature is to simply draw on the material you want with a pen. The cameras will read your design, vectorize it, then the laser will frickin’ cut it exactly as you’ve drawn it.   This is worthy of some type of award because it will save a lot of time for people. I constantly have students who would benefit from simply being able to draw their designs by hand and quickly cut a part out. Again, this feature somewhat comes from newer research into user interface design of laser cutters I’ve been keeping my eye on for some time now.

Paradigm shift 3: Glowforge uses dual cameras inside the cabinet to not only allow you to place your design on the material, but it can conform and auto focus even on non-level materials.  The example on their web video mentions etching a design on a macbook, but this is sooo much more powerful and useful than just that.  Many materials you want to laser, such as a 1/8″ piece of plywood, have a warp to them. If you focus your laser on the low part of the warp, then keep that measurement to cut the whole part, you can end up with edges that aren’t exactly as you had designed them, or edges that are weak due to the wood not ablating and instead burning. This is bad for a couple of reasons. One it can start small fires, but more commonly your edge is brittle and ashy. This changes the workable dimensions of your parts and sometimes makes them unusable.

Also, the cameras can detect materials you put in the machine.  There are barcodes on the materials you buy from Glowforge, but you can make them yourself, which tell the machine what settings to use for engraving or cutting the material. Settings are different for plastics versus wood, etc.  Even different densities of wood matter, so this is a great solution to the problem of figuring out what power and speed settings to set the laser to use.

And finally on this point, it seems there’s also some image recognition. Put your laptop in there and you it’ll detect it’s a macbook and know what settings to use to best etch it. It can even bring up possible designed others have submitted online for you to use if you want.

Paradigm shift 4: The firmware as well as a simplified version of the cloud software will be made open source. This is great because I can hack on it (as I would have done anyway, but at least now I have a much better starting point) . I’m certain a community of hackers/makers will be adding features, which is exciting since this machine is already starting with an impressive set of features.

Paradigm shift 4:  On the Pro version of the machine, you can open the front and back to be able to cut material that is 20″wide, but infinitely long.  This comes from two places, the vinyl cutting machines that are in the market (which can cut a certain width, but practically an infinite length of material from a spool), the Shaper and the awesome Shopbot Handibot (Shoutout to our friends and fellow Carolinian’s; thanks again for the help this past summer in Pittsburgh Salley!), which can do large designs piece-wise. The cameras on the Glowforge can help align the previously lasered portion with your design and make adjustments as needed.   This is incredibly helpful for making sure the  finished product comes out correctly.

Glowforge will also host a libray of other peoples’ designs you can choose from if you aren’t the artistic type.   This is similar to Makerbot’s Thingiverse or Ultimaker’s YouMagine for 3D parts and Inventables’s project section for CNC projects and file, which can be imported into Easel (Inventables’s cloud-based CNC CAD/CAM software for their line of Shapeoko, Carvey, or X-carve machines).

Words of Negativity: For the specs of the machine, the 20″ wide cutting area is slightly awkward and a 24″ width seems more practical. Also, since the Glowforge isn’t out yet, I have to wait. I have to wait to see if it lives up to these expectations, and also wait to play with it myself.

All that being said, the Glowforge sale at this point is a presale. I won’t receive my machine until summer 2016 or later, but you have until the time it ships to cancel your order and get a full refund.  I expect any bugs in the system will be worked out before I get mine and if not, then I’ll have a good excuse to play with it in more depth.

Adam-Atom

Disclaimer: The only affiliate link in this post is for the Glowforge. All other links supplied in this post are to simplify your internet browsing adventure.

My Shapeoko Version 1 to Version 2 Conversion Adventures

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whole machine Forgive this messy rant….

After obsessing over CNC machines for about 10 years, and having some misadventures from time to time designing my own hardware and software, I jumped at the chance to order the original Shapeoko CNC mill mechanical kit as soon as it came out. It took me a year to find time to put it all together. After it was assembled, I connected up my old HobbyCNCPro Motor driver board to it. This driver board is for Unipolar motors, so I searched for some that would work.  I found these NEMA 17s from pololu <<LINK>>

 

On a previous attempt at making a CNC machine, I used Mach 3, but this time I went with LinuxCNC.  The main reason I wanted the machine was to mill PCBs. The workflow was EaglecAD–>pcb-Gcode–>autoleveller–>linuxCNC.<<LINK>>  I made a few really horrible PCBs with the machine before realizing it simply wasn’t the tool for the job. The gantry had way too much play.  The eShapeoko community was constantly updating and improving on the designs, so I waited it out until the V2 came out before the obsession hit me again when I saw how they doubled the gantry slides to improve strength.

 

After a year of V2 being on the market, I searched forums for a conversion pack but none was to be found. So I spent a while trying to define the differences between the machines. In the end, I spent probably just as much as buying a whole new mechanical kit, but here’s my process.

First, instead of buying all new motor mount plates, I only bought 2.  I then modified a couple of my plates from my original machine.  IN the image below, you can see the original plate on the right, the new plate on the left, and the modified one in the middle. I basically just had someone with a drill press line up the new plate with the old and drill out a two holes at the top that could attach the 70mm machine screws through to make the carriage assembly (pictured further down.)

plates1

The V1 Y rails became my new gantry, leaving me with something like 375mm in that dimension. After I mounted the carriage assembly, I saw that the Z axis had no holes to mount to.  To remedy this, I simply used the V1 Z plate as an interface between the new Z axis and the carriage.  In the image below, you can see the bolts I had to extend with short nylon spacers so they could mount the old Z plate and line up with the original eccentric nut circled in green while the four 70mm long spacer screws are circled in blue. (I had to buy 4 70mm M5 bolts on amazon as inventabes doesn’t sell them for some reason).

plates2

Zplate

Below you can see the spacers and everything inside the carriage assembly. This is a “bottom-up” view after the Z axis has been mounted.

Carriage1

I was able to use the belt and the belt standoffs from my V1 on the gantry with no problem, but the lower profile of the new motor mount plates that became my new Y axis required the belt to be clipped to the slide itself.  Instead of buying them, I just laid my V1 standoffs for the belt flat and mounted them that way. This reduced cutting area, but the first thing I will cut will be smaller belt clips.

I ordered a 1000mm piece of Makerslide and cut it directly in half, leaving me with about 500mm rails.  I mounted these up with new end mount plates and some 80 X 20 aluminum.  I was disappointed to see that I couldn’t use readily available half-inch MDF as spoilboard on top of the extrusion, so I just mounted the entire machine on a 500mm X 500mm piece of half-inch MDF.  This gives me a bit more Z depth.

I was not very excited when I saw that my cutting area is less now than it was with the V1. I’m contemplating ordering more makerslide if I need to in the future.

Another change I made was to get a unipolar stepper with the shaft sticking out of the back for my z axis, and used a 3d printer to print a thumbwheel to attach to it. Now I don’t have to struggle to adjust the Z axis by hand anymore. I hadn’t used this company before, but <<LINK HERE>  stepper world?  was cheap, shipped fast and packaged everything great. The only problem I found with the datasheet they included is that they had labeled the brown wire “BLW”  for some reason.

 

If I can find another NEMA23 aound the house, I will replace my Y axis motors with NEMA23s for added power.

 

I’m also hacking on the electronics. I added the 4th axis motor driver to the HobbyCNC Pro board and would like to use it to drive a 3d printer extruder. Since the HobbyCNC Pro board interfaces with a parallel port, it isn’t very practical for my laptop, so I decided to slap an arduino on there running GRBL to simplify the entire process. After seeing a demonstration of chillipeppr for GRBL, I’m thinking of using that.  I kind of dig the browser-based tools available for controlling the machine for their simplicity.I don’t wanna use my PhD to make PCBs I just want to click a button and be done with it. It shouldn’t be such a pill to make things on the CNC. For using GRBL with 4 axes, I’m looking at using the spindle speed control as my extruder, or using a slave ATmega328, or even just getting the timing set for strapping my 3doodler onto the thing.  The interfacing of the driver and the arduino should be pretty straightforward, I just need to wire X direction on one to X direction on the other, etc. for the most part.

My tool tip wobbles as the Z goes up and down, which sounds to me like I have a bent leadscrew somehow. I’ not sure about this and will have to hack on it later.

Anyway, that’s my progress so far. Any more info and I’ll post it when I get the chance.

 

Adam-Atom