With all the 8 legged beasts lumbering about and hosting sausage fests, it’s nice to see the robots with 6 legs actually being productive. [Matt Denton]’s hexapod robot CNC router is quite an impressive piece of machinery. The B.F. Hexapod was built using Hitech’s HSR-5995TG which are much higher torque than similar sized units. Each foot is ball joint mounted to ease terrain adaptation. Only recently has [Matt] started playing with CNC. First, he did a pen plotter proof of concept. Now The bot can mill 3D surfaces in polystyrene. It’s still a little course and will probably always be a bit imprecise since it’s not bolted down. He’s also still planning to convert it from standard 1/8inch bits to 3mm router bits. We’d love to see this bot working away at an intricate bas-relief. Having no fixed work envelope really opens up the possibilities for machines like this and Hektor. Video and final product are embedded below.
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CNC Milling Gun Parts
Gun issues aside, [Justin]’s been CNC milling his own gun parts for quite a while. We’ve been a fan of his work simply because of the technical challenge that this sort of milling presents. Even if you’re anti-gun, you should check out the work he’s been turning out. Pictured is one of his early projects: a 92fs Beretta frame in the process of being milled from a solid block of aluminum. Our friend the gun nut is insanely jealous of his AR45 lower project.
The Best CNC Project Machines
We’ve lost track of the number of home built CNC machines we’ve covered in the past, but we thought a comprehensive list of the best would help you understand why we’re so excited about the LumenLab CNC machine.
Lumenlab’s New Kit: Open Source CNC
Imagine our surprise when we stumbled on the latest Lumenlab project: gantry style CNC. Until now the only time we ever invoked their name was for DIY projectors. The kit looks pretty interesting, and they’re taking pre-orders right now. It’s designed for a full sized router and you should be able to cut a 4′ by 8′ sheet with a feed roll. Even without, the cutting area is a large 26″ by 50″ and features 8″ of Z movement. Between their kit and an order from Online Metals, they’re projecting that you can build your own for around $1000. We’re definitely in when the final kit is released in June.
Quick And Easy CNC Setup Tricks
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc-9gTFj-y4&hl=en]
I was considering a laser cross-hair for my mill and found this video of some great setup hacks that [Greolt] put on his mill. The video is pretty short, but I’ll fill you in just in case you don’t want to play/load it. A laser cross-hair is mounted at a known offset to align the X and Y axis. A PC board is wired to a sensor to zero in the Z axis. When the bit makes contact, the machine knows that it’s at 0 + the PCB thickness. A shuttle pro controller adds jog controls and a macro takes care of moving the bit to the zero that was measured with the laser cross-hair. You can find more details on his zero touch setup here.
PCB Milling Hell Sunday Extra
I’ve spent about 18 of the last 24 hours working on milling a PC board for my upcoming how-to. So far I’ve murdered several copper clad boards, built a hold down table, redesigned the board in eagle at least five times and snapped off a $15 half round engraving bit.
If you’re wondering, my new board milling table is a piece of MDF that I laser etched a .25″ grid onto, then added some aluminum strips to act as hold-downs. On the side of the strip opposite the board, I put thin slices of PC board to level out the hold downs. As usual, I’m building the board in eagle. To turn the board into something the mill can handle, I’m using pcb-gcode, a nice little g-code generation tool for eagle. I may switch methods later, but if I can get the settings tweaked, it’ll make my design to board milling process very fast.
[Scott] sent in the beginning of his attempt to build a frequency detector. He’s started out with just simple LCD matrix. Nothing intensely interesting just yet, but I like it when people send in stuff they’re working on.
If you haven’t checked out the Arduino yet, do it. It’s the easiest micro controller dev platform I’ve seen. If you’ve got one, now you can hook up a Wii-Nunchuck to it. If you like smaller and cheaper, check out [ladyada]’s boarduino.
[eliot] wanted me to mention this video on hacking drive through speakers. It’s a bit cheesy – and all I could think of was Thunder Run – where the geek character swapped the crystals in the CB radios. (Warning, The FCC might have some expensive words for you if you get caught.) Update: this is what you get if you don’t watch the entire video and catch the joke about taking apart toasters.
Tomorrow I should be picking out some winners for my laser etched laptop (or whatever) offer. You can still win some free etching time! Just send in a tip! The winners are selected from the ones that get published on Hack-A-Day.
Hackit: A Better Homebrew Control Interface?
I’ve built a few CNC controllers, and I’ve been a bit disappointed by the state of the control interfaces. Most diy systems rely on a parallel port interface, while a few use a serial connection. Just one that I’ve seen has an actual USB interface, but it’s limited to use with the fab@home software for now.
So what’s the hackit of the day? I think that the hardware hacking, home fabrication community could really benefit from a standardized I/O interface for driving CNC machines, robotics or anything else along those lines. For CNC work, it’ll need a serial or parallel port emulation scheme to allow existing software to take advantage of it. For quicker home development, some simple API’s for controlling the device would be excellent. Imagine using perl to develop robot logic with just a few easy function calls…
Hackit is really your show, so lets hear your ideas.
