Just a quick note – my How-To on building your own MP3 player is up. It’s more of a build walk-through and a review of MAKE’s Daisy MP3 player kit.

In case you missed it, Ben Heck put up a How-to on making your own robotic hand. It’s more of an exercise in CAD design with the intent to cut the parts on a CNC machine. It’s a great view into Ben’s workflow. He used to torture er train graphic artists at some point, and he puts that experience to work in his designs. Speaking of which, you might dig his SCART video switcher.

I’ve got to say that I’m impressed with the effort I’ve seen so far on the Design Challenge. You’ve got five more days to get em in.

Before I forget, I need a good supplier of teflon/ptfe insulated wire (at a decent price). Suggestions?

Yes folks it’s true: You can build a computer controlled 3-axis circuit board mill from cutting boards, a pile of printer parts and a Dremel. My coworker [Will] has posted the third and final installment of his CNC machine build on Engadget. This project was launched when Will stumbled across plans for an incredibly elegant and cheap ($22~$30) 3-axis stepper motor controller that originally appeared in Nuts&Volts in 1994. It uses a discontinued UCN5804B chip, but he lists a source for them. Building the controller and scavenging stepper motors from old dot-matrix printers is covered in part 1. For the body of the machine Will chopped up a couple cheap 1/2″ thick cutting boards from Sam’s Club. The polyethlene probably isn’t as good as say Delrin but it wins out for availability. Steel rod from the hardware store is used for the linear slides. Part 2 covers the constructions of the first axis (the table) which rides on inch long nuts on threaded rod. Part 3 covers assembling the final two axes in the head and installing the Dremel’s flex head. Amazingly he nearly got the entire thing built in the span of two evenings.

Continue reading “How-to Build Your Own CNC Mill” →

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, [owen] sent along a link to his computer controlled router table for balsa cutting. This was his project before switching to lasers and sheetmetal. The write up starts with an interesting discussion about CNC not really being a magical tool or time saver. Sure, it can be pretty quick about cutting accurate pieces, but you still have to assemble it. Most likely all of the time you saved cutting was spent designing and prepping, which you could have spent cutting accurate parts by hand. Owen had extra time to spend designing since he was traveling for business. He does admit that the ability to quickly generate replacement parts has made him a more courageous pilot.

Other gems from yesterday’s comments: CNCZone is apparently the one-stop shop for all of you CNC hobbyist needs. [javamoose] pointed out that he’s nearly done with his scratch built CNC machine seen on bit-tech. [mike]’s FIRST robotics team is in the process of converting a punch tape driven Bridgeport NC mill. They found the owner of wimb.net very helpful. [ivan256] recommended the plans found on John C Kleinbauer’s site.

Continue reading “Computer Controlled Balsa Router” →

There was a little interest in Graham’s 3D scanning probe, but this is what he is normally using his tiny CNC machine for: manufacturing components for a tiny RC ornithopter. The scale of this thing is amazing. From the tiny gear train to the 0.5mm carbon spars the frame is constructed from. The rudder control only weighs one gram and the entire device comes in at 17 grams.

Continue reading “12″ RC Ornithopter” →