Monday, February 11, 2013

Virtual movement!

Received most of my parts for the CNC machine now - all that's missing is a few bearings, an aluminum rod and the wood for the frame itself.

I was originally planing on connecting the CNC-router driver to my Mac, but as it turns out CNC-driver boards are only using the parallel port. This is due to the unreliability of the USB protocol/port and the fact that there's a very low number of I/O pins compared to LPT-ports.

Luckily, my father had an old laptop that I could use instead. Really ancient hardware, but since the Mach3 software is designed for very low end computers it works just fine!

Behold!

1) CNC-software Mach3. Currently "dry-running" the example "roadrunner.tap" file.
The vast amount of configurable things in this software is staggering. Hopefully I won't have to trim each one of them since I'm going for sub-millimeter accuracy - not sub-nanometer...

Now I'll just need to get the power supply and motors connected!

No comments:

Post a Comment