cnc

652 Articles

Teaching An Old Lathe New Tricks With A Programmable Power Feed

October 4, 2020 by 17 Comments

Ask anybody whose spent time standing in front of a mill or lathe and they’ll tell you that some operations can get tedious. When you need to turn down a stainless rod by 1/4″ in 0.030″ increments, you get a lot of time to reflect on why you didn’t just buy the right size stock as you crank the wheel back and forth. That’s where the lead screw comes in — most lathes have a gear-driven lead screw that can be used to actuate the z-axis ( the one which travels parallel to the axis of rotation). It’s no CNC, but this type of gearing makes life easier and it’s been around for a long time.

[Tony Goacher] took this idea a few steps further when he created the Leadscrew Buddy. He coupled a beautiful 1949 Myford lathe with an Arduino, a stepper motor, and a handful of buttons to add some really useful capabilities to the antique machine. By decoupling the lead screw from the lathe’s gearbox and actuating it via a stepper motor, he achieved a much more granular variable feed speed.

If that’s not enough, [Tony] used a rotary encoder to display the cutting tool’s position on a home-built Digital Readout (DRO). The pièce de résistance is a “goto” command. Once [Tony] sets a home position, he can command the z-axis to travel to a set point at a given speed. Not only does this make turning easier, but it makes the process more repeatable and yields a smoother finish on the part.

These features may not seem so alien to those used to working with modern CNC lathes, but to the vast majority of us garage machinists, [Tony]’s implementation is an exciting look at how we can step up our turning game. It also fits nicely within the spectrum of lathe projects we’ve seen here at Hackaday- from the ultra low-tech to the ludicrously-precise.

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This DIY Drill Press Is Very Well Executed

September 22, 2020 by 22 Comments

Plenty of projects we see here could easily be purchased in some form or other. Robot arms, home automation, drones, and even some software can all be had with a quick internet search, to be sure. But there’s no fun in simply buying something when it can be built instead. The same goes for tools as well, and this homemade drill press from [ericinventor] shows that it’s not only possible to build your own tools rather than buy them, but often it’s cheaper as well.

This mini drill press has every feature we could think of needing in a tool like this. It uses off-the-shelf components including the motor and linear bearing carriage (which was actually salvaged from the Z-axis of a CNC machine). The chassis was built from stock aluminum and bolted together, making sure to keep everything square so that the drill press is as precise as possible. The movement is controlled from a set of 3D printed gears which are turned by hand.

The drill press is capable of drilling holes in most materials, including metal, and although small it would be great for precision work. [ericinventor] notes that it’s not necessary to use a separate motor, and that it’s possible to use this build with a Dremel tool if one is already available to you. Either way, it’s a handy tool to have around the shop, and with only a few modifications it might be usable as a mill as well.

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Cyberplotter Uses Multiple Tools To Great Success

September 17, 2020 by 14 Comments

The CNC bug is a familiar ailment in these parts. Often, patients present with persistent obsession with computer controlled machinery, most commonly after initial contact with gateway hardware such as 3D printers or basic plotters. Once diagnosed, there is no cure – simply the desire to build, and build again. [Adam Haile] knows this all too well, and built the Cyberplotter in service to the affliction. 

The Cyberplotter is the culmination of [Adam]’s CNC wishlist – a two-axis build with a seriously large build area, and the capability to mount a whole bunch of different tools for different jobs. With a work area of up to 800mm x 750mm depending on what’s mounted, it can produce some seriously big output. With a Smoothieboard 5X running the show, [Adam] does all kinds of neat hacks to make the system play with different gadgets on the business end. There’s a laser for engraving, and a top-notch pen plotter featuring a high-quality linear rail for precise movement. But the fun doesn’t stop there – [Adam] goes so far as mounting a Z-axis, camera, and even a Sharpie-based airbrush which we’d never even contemplated before.

It’s not [Adam]’s first build, and past experience shines through here – armed with prior knowledge, the build does many things well without compromising on outright capability. You may find [Adam]’s name familiar – we’ve featured his Engravinator on these pages before. Video after the break.

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Measure 1024 Times, Cut Once

September 8, 2020 by 25 Comments

Typically, someone’s first venture into coding doesn’t get a lot of attention. Then again, most people don’t program a CNC table saw right out of the gate. [Jeremy Fielding] wasn’t enticed with “Blink” or “Hello, world,” and took the path less traveled. He tackled I/O, UX, and motion in a single project, which we would equate to climbing K2 as a way to get into hiking. The Python code was over 500 lines, so we feel comfortable calling him an over-achiever.

The project started after he replaced the fence on his saw and wondered if he could automate it, and that was his jumping-on point, but he didn’t stop there. He automated the blade height and angle with stepper motors, so the only feedback is limit switches to keep it from running into itself. The brains are a Raspberry Pi that uses the GPIO for everything. There is a manual mode so he can use the hand cranks to make adjustments like an ordinary saw, but he loses tracking there. His engineering background shines through in his spartan touchscreen application and robust 3D model. The built-in calculator is a nice touch, and pulling the calculations directly to a motion axis field is clever.

We’ve covered [Jeremy]’s DIY dynamometer and look forward to whatever he builds next. Until then, check out a light-duty approach to CNC that cuts foam in two-and-a-half dimensions.

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A Backlit Calendar For All Eternity

September 8, 2020 by 7 Comments

The advantage of the irregularities in the Gregorian calendar combined with the seven-day week is that they provide a constant source of yearly revenue for the paper calendar industry. Long before sustainability became a trending topic, people invented reusable, perpetual calendars, but the non-digital versions of these are sometimes complicated tables that are hard to interpret. [andrei.erdei] created an automated perpetual calendar that is mostly hardware but uses some digital tricks to overcome these problems.

The calendar consists of sandwiched panels of smoked acrylic which are backlit by some strips of WS2812Bs. Although the panels could have been processed with a laser cutter, [andrei.erdei] used a CNC which gave him the possibility to mill some grooves in the back panel to hold the LED strips. The stencil for the numbers was simply printed out on paper and the background made opaque by printing several times over the same piece of paper. The electronics consist of an ESP8266 which takes the date from an NTP server and lights up the corresponding LEDs in different colors for weekdays and weekends.

The classic version of this type of perpetual calendar uses a sliding frame but we have also seen completely different versions based on moving gears.

Video after the break.

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Easy Focus Stacking With Your CNC Machine

September 7, 2020 by 15 Comments

Macro photography is the art of taking photos of things very close up, and ideally at great detail. Unfortunately cameras have poor depth of field at close ranges, so to get around this, many use focus stacking techniques. This involves taking many photos at different focal lengths and digitally compositing them together. To help achieve this, [gtoal] realized that garden variety CNC machines would be perfect for the job.

To focus stack effectively, it’s desirable to move the camera in very small increments of sub-mm precision, in order to get different parts of the subject in focus. For this, a CNC machine excels, as it’s designed to move tool heads in very tiny, precise movements.

To achieve a bargain focus stacking rig, [gtoal] used a Dremel tool mount for cutting discs. It’s repurposed here, used as an easy way to fit a Raspberry Pi camera to a CNC tool head through its mounting holes. From there, it’s a simple manner of stepping the CNC a tiny amount at a time on the Z-axis, while taking photos with the Raspberry Pi along the way. [gtoal] notes that it would be simple for an experienced CNC user to whip up a program to automate the entire process.

We’ve seen other budget focus stacking rigs before, and even a busted 3D printer that was turned into an automated scanning microscope. If you’ve got your own tricks for top notch macro photography, drop us a note in the tipline!

The B-Sides: Curious Uses Of Off-the-Shelf Parts

September 2, 2020 by 44 Comments

I admit: a few years of prototyping without easy machine shop access really whets my tastebuds for turning metal chips. But all that time spent away from proper machine tools has also pushed me to re-imagine part catalogs, something I see almost every day. Without any precision metalworking tools handy, stock mechanical parts have become my supplement for complexity. And so a former dogma to machine-everything-thyself has been transformed into a hunt for that already-made-part-that-does-it-for-you.

But with part catalogs featuring tens of thousands of purpose-built parts, I started reimagining some of them for other misdeeds. And after a few years spent reinventing use cases for some of these parts, I’m about ready to tell you how to misuse them properly. So today I’d like to show you some of my favorite mechanical part B-sides, so to speak. These are ordinary parts in unorthodox places–something you surely won’t find in the datasheet! Now let’s have a look. Continue reading “The B-Sides: Curious Uses Of Off-the-Shelf Parts” →