Caught the CNC Bug
I’ve always been fascinated by CNC machines. They fall pretty squarely in the middle of my interests: computers, electronics, mechanical widgets, and makin’ stuff. I was inspired…
The Eagle Has Landed
The machine arrived at the Manchester Airport UPS Freight terminal in the wee hours of the morning, and I arranged to have it held so we could…
Making Chips
Now that the machine is here, I decided to do a small project to start my way up the learning curve. For a while I’ve been planning…
CNC Kit Ordered!
So I finally pulled the trigger on ordering the CNC conversion kit for my mill. After a fair amount of internal debate trying to decide between the…
Stepper Motors
The stepper motors have arrived! I went with the same brand that ProMiCA used in their kit, but the higher torque version. Still need to order my…
Three Cheers for Flat-Rate Postage Boxes
My linear power supply arrived today, and it’s big and heavy as I expected. After poring over data sheets and doing more research and fretting and calculating,…
Gecko Infestation
The Gecko stepper motor drivers have arrived, along with my cheap and cheerful dual PCI parallel port card. There should be enough stuff here to make some…
Signs of Life
Finally had some time this weekend to hook up a stepper drive, stepper motor, power supply, and a PC to see if EMC2 would move a motor. …
Symphony of Steppers
I wired up all three axes today, and also hooked up the super high quality 200V DMM module that I picked up on eBay direct from China….
Kit Has Arrived!
The ProMiCA CNC kit has arrived! Now just the significant task of putting it all together remains… Kit quality is quite high – part fit and finish…
Kit Installation Has Begun
Last night I finally was able to start the process of tearing down my milling machine and rebuilding it with the parts from the CNC kit. I…
Pictures of the Conversion (so far…)
Here are some photos of the conversion so far, mostly the tear-down and building up the Z axis. In other news, the kit manufacturers have supposedly shipped…
It’s Alive!
Well, the part hasn’t yet arrived from Australia, despite the company shipping it out with all due speed. Kudos to them for doing that, but the fact…
More Pictures
Here’s the result of another one of the included G-Code files from EMC2. Superficially it looks pretty neat, but it exposes some of the issues I’m currently…
Y Axis Debugging
Posted for the EMC2 folks on IRC. Here is a simple test with my dial indicator. Here is another test, which uses my “poor man’s DRO” to…