cnc hacks

920 Articles

Steel Tubes And Ground Plates Form The Skeleton Of This DIY Vertical CNC Mill

November 27, 2019 by 29 Comments

If you’re going to do it yourself, you might as well outdo yourself. That seems to be the thinking behind this scratch-built CNC mill, and it’s only just getting started.

According to [Kris Temmerman], the build will cost about $10,000 by the time he’s done. So it’s not cheap, and a personal CNC from Tormach can be had for less, but that’s missing the point entirely. [Kris] built most of the structural elements for the vertical mill from cheap, readily available steel tubing, of the kind used for support columns in commercial buildings. Mounted to those are thick, precision-ground steel plates, which eat up a fair fraction of the budget. Those in turn hold 35 mm linear bearings and ball screws for the three axes, each powered by a beefy servo. The spindle is a BT30 with a power drawbar, belt-driven by an external motor that [Kris] doesn’t share the specs on, but judging from the way it flings chips during the test cut in the video below, we’d say it’s pretty powerful.

There’s still plenty to do, not least of which is stiffening the column; perhaps filling it with epoxy granite would do the trick? But it sure looks like [Kris] is building a winner here, and if he keeps the level of craftsmanship up going forward, he’ll have a top-quality machine on his hands.

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DIY CNC Router Uses Chains The Right Way

November 19, 2019 by 28 Comments

There are a million and one ways to build your own CNC router, depending on your tastes, budget, and application, your design choices will differ accordingly. [Steve Tyng] was well aware of this when undertaking his project, and built the machine that made sense for him.

[Steve’s] build has a strong focus on keeping costs down, and that’s reflected in the hardware used. Wanting a large work area of 30″ x 60″, off-the-shelf linear rails in 6 foot lengths were prohibitively expensive. Instead, 1″ angle iron was sourced from the local garden centre, and used in conjunction with steel v-bearings. It’s a lot cheaper, and good enough for the application at hand, so why not? Other smart choices abound, such as using an IKEA cabinet as the base, and a fanless computer to run the show to avoid death by dust.

When it came time to build the axes, there was plenty of roller chain on hand. Chain is usually passed up for options such as timing belts or ballscrews in the CNC community, as it tends to stretch over time and offers poor accuracy. However, [Steve] took stock of the drawbacks of the method, and made efforts to overcome these weak points in the design. The Y and X axes were specially designed to keep the chain supported along its length. This helped avoid the problem of long drooping chains and poor tension.

While it’s not an industrial-strength build with world-beating accuracy, it’s a solid CNC machine that can carve out large workpieces without issue. Over the years, we’ve seen plenty of DIY CNCs, built with everything from PVC pipe to welded steel. Video after the break.

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Jubilee: A Toolchanging Homage To 3D Printer Hackers Everywhere

November 14, 2019 by 36 Comments

I admit that I’m late to the 3D printing game. While I just picked up my first printer in 2018, the rest of us have been oozing out beautiful prints for over a decade. And in that time we’ve seen many people reimagine the hardware for mischief besides just printing plastic. That decade of hacks got me thinking: what if the killer-app of 3D printing isn’t the printing? What if it’s programmable motion? With that, I wondered: what if we had a machine that just offered us motion capabilities? What if extending those motion capabilities was a first class feature? What if we had a machine that was meant to be hacked?

One year later, I am thrilled to release an open-source multitool motion platform I call Jubilee. For a world that’s hungry for toolchanging 3D printers, Jubilee might be the best toolchanging 3D printer you can build yourself–with nothing more than a set of hand tools and some patience. But it doesn’t stop there. With a standardized tool pattern established by E3D and a kinematically coupled hot-swappable bed, Jubilee is rigged to be extended by anyone looking to harness its programmable motion capabilities for some ad hoc automation.

Jubilee is my homage to you, the 3D printer hacker; but it’s meant to serve the open-source community at large. Around the world, scientists, artists, and hackers alike use the precision of automated machines for their own personal exploration and expression. But the tools we use now are either expensive or cumbersome–often coupled with a hefty learning curve but no up-front promise that they’ll meet our needs. To that end, Jubilee is meant to shortcut the knowledge needed to get things moving, literally. Jubilee wants to be an API for motion.

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Forget Printing Labels For Your Bathtub Hooch, Why Not Engrave The Bottle?

November 2, 2019 by 20 Comments

[BlueFlower] sends in this cool wine bottle engraver. It’s a simple machine that reminds us of the infamous EggBot. One axis can move in x and z while the other axis rotates the work piece. The EggBot works in spherical coordinates while this one lives in a cylindrical world.

The base of the device appears to be an older project of [BlueFlower]’s an XY-Plotter/Cutter. The plotter itself is a very standard twin-motor gantry design. In fact, it looks like when the machine is converted to bottle engraving, the drivers which previously moved the Y-axis are re-purposed to move two rollers. The rollers themselves are suspiciously similar to those found inside 2D printers. We all have them kicking around our junk drawers, but it’s rare to see them actually being used. The spindled is just a DC motor with a ball grinder coupled to the end.

As for the final result, we have to admit that the engraved bottles are quite fetching. Catch a video of the engraving process after the break.

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High-Precision Air Bearing CNC Lathe And Grinder

October 31, 2019 by 27 Comments

You know you’re in for a treat when you are told that a lathe which can reach a resolution of one micrometer (1×10−6, a millionth of a meter, or 0.00004″ for people who love zeros) is ‘not hard to build’.  This is one of the opening statements in this video by [Dan Gelbart], as he walks the viewer through the details of a custom CNC lathe which he built. (Video embedded below.)

As it’s a combined CNC lathe and grinder, it uses custom software he had developed specifically for the machine. Much of the high precision of the machine is courtesy of air bearings. All but two of the air bearings were made by [Dan], with the two surplus air bearings he used coming from machines used in the semiconductor industry.

The bed of the machine is formed out of off-the-shelf reference granite, to which the other parts are epoxied, providing a stable base with well-defined dimensions. Though perhaps a few light years beyond most DIY lathe efforts, [Dan]’s videos nevertheless provide a treasure trove of tips and information for lathe builders and users alike. Certainly worth a look.

Thanks [Drew] for the tip in the comments.
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Retro Hardware Plots Again Thanks To Grbl And ESP32

October 24, 2019 by 11 Comments

When it comes to building a new CNC machine, you’ve got a wide world of controller boards to choose from. Whether you’re building a 3D-printer or a CNC plasma cutter, chances are good you’ll find a controller that fits your needs and your budget. Not so much, though, when you want to add CNC to a pen plotter from the early days of the PC revolution.

[Barton Dring] just posted the last installment of a five-part series in which he documented putting an Atari 1020 plotter under CNC control. The plotter was a peripheral for the Atari line of 6502 machines from the late 1970s; the guts of the little roll-fed, ballpoint-pen plotter appeared in Commodore, Tandy, and TI versions as well. [Bart]’s goal was to not add or modify anything to the mechanically simple device apart from the controller. That was easier said than done, given the unipolar stepper motors controlling the pen position and paper roll, and the fact that the pen lift mechanism uses a solenoid. Support for those had to be added to his Grbl_ESP32 firmware, as did dealing with the lack of homing switches in the plotter, and adapting the Grbl tool change command to the pen color change mechanism, which rotates the pen holder by bumping it into the right-hand carriage stop. The stock controller was replaced by a custom PCB that fits perfectly within the case, with plenty of room to spare. The video below shows it plotting out a vexillogically relevant sample.

From custom coasters to wooden nickels to complex string art, [Bart] has really put Grbl through the wringer. We really like this retro-redo, though, and fully support his stated desire to convert more old hardware to Grbl_ESP32.

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A Masterpiece, But Our Maestro Is A CNC Machine

September 13, 2019 by 12 Comments

Sometimes we manage to miss projects when they first appear, only to have the joy of discovering them a while later. So it is with [John Opsahl]’s Project Convert To Paint, a CNC painting ‘bot that takes a bitmap image and paints it on canvas as a fine artist would, with a real brush, and paints.

It was first created for the 2017 robotart.org competition, and takes the form of a fairly standard CNC gantry machine. It departs from the norm in its chuck however, as it has what is described as a universal artist chuck, capable of holding a variety of artistic implements. The images are converted from bitmap to vector format, and thence to gcode with the help of a bit of custom Python code.

He’s at pains to say that simply because an image can be converted to a paintable format does not mean that it will produce a good picture. But some of the results are rather impressive, delivering anything from a pointilist effect to a broader brush stroke. We can see that with a bit of experience in the processing it would be possible to create a veritable gallery of masterpieces.

We may have missed this one the first time, but we did catch another drawbot from the same competition.