CNC

I have been away for a while again :(.  But right now I am sitting at my desk sick as a dog.  I felt I should take this time to update my LMR.  I haven't been able to post my current projects on this site because of this.  Saskatoon TechWorks, a new hackerspace community that has been established.  This means that I will be able to share my knowledge and tools with other like minded individuals.  As an added bonus, I get to use awesome tools as well.

Hi all!

A new year, a new reboot.

Valkyrie is officially dead, buried, gone ... RIP Valkyrie. 

She did her job, teaching me a lot of stuff about mechanics, electronics, programming and building stuff in general. 

Probably the most important thing I learned is to take your time doing stuff, because finishing fast does not always mean you finished good, sometimes you end up with a really crappy part and all work was in vane. Starting with  2011 I'll take the time to do it right, no mater how long it takes, if the end result counts.  

I finally finished my Fireball V90 CNC build.  In May, I got the frame, and I planned to use the motors and electronics I purchased for upgrading the Valkyrie-clone CNC.  So I made some NEMA-17 to NEMA-23 adapter plates from CD-R disks, and got it all up and running.  It's running off 12V for now, with 24V planned in the future.

Long time ago, about 5 years I think, I started looking up DIY CNC machines. I bought the 4 axis EZ Driver combo kit from Hobby CNC, together with the CNC plan they had at the time. But I didn't had time to order the acme screws and linear bearings and I left USA and returned to Romania. Over there, I had an attempt after this site, but it didn't came out good as I did some mistakes.

I have just finished the mechanical building of my CNC..

Hi all,

In the last three weeks, and especially the last week, I've been working on V3, trying to finish it.

Oh well ... it will not happen because:

- it is a very large project and it consists of a very large number of parts

- everything that could have gone wrong ... got wrong

- I'm running out of time

- cutting parts using the V2 in an apartment is just crazy, I had enough of the noise and more so of the dust

- killed all my endmills

- almost destroyed the V2 forcing it to go faster

Hi all!

Here is quick rendering on how V3 will lokk like :) Almost finished the design, still little things to take care of, I can start cutting soon.

Has a Borg feeling to it :D 

Update - Z-axis

Or how to get from this:

Hi,

I finally got an usable result trying to mill PCB with my machine. 

I tested using this Eagle PCB layout:

I then generated g-code out of it using the pcb-gcode eagle plugin with the settings below:

Hi all,

I've been working on the driver for the next CNC, V3.

This one should be able to drive bigger motors up to about 2.5 Amps per coil, while providing current limiting.

It's features shold be the following:

- wave, full and halfstepping selectable in software

- I2C and step/dir/enable interface available on board

- home sensors connectors

Below is an iamge of the PCB I layed out:

Hi all,

If no one has anything against it, I will use this blog to post projects done with the Valkyrie.

To start with, here is the design flow I found to work well for doing stuff with the Valkyrie. Actually there are two flows, one for PCB making and another for cutting, milling etc. Note that I'm using Linux to do all my stuff, for Windows I have no clue which software to use. 

1. PCB's

a. The PCB is designed with Eagle which can be found here: http://www.cadsoft.de/