cnc

661 Articles

Cheap XY Table Using Hobby Servos

September 30, 2008 by 6 Comments

[CarlS] wanted to build a low cost x y table for display on teletoyland.com. He realized that to keep cost low, he could use hobby servos instead of stepper motors. Exact precision wasn’t a big issue here, so the hobby servos would be perfectly acceptable.

Though Linear hobby servos are available, he decided that the cost was prohibitive.  He used normal hobby servos, but had to modify their internals to get the exact amount of travel necessary. Many people modify the hobby servos for continuous rotation, but this would cause a loss in the ability for exact positioning. Instead, he replaced the potentiometer that measures the position of the servo with a 10 turn potentiometer. This allowed him 10x the travel.

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CNC Wood Router

August 3, 2008 by 16 Comments


[GlacialWanderer] has published the first pictures from his CNC machine build. It’s a three axis gantry style machine that he intends to route and engrave wood with. He’s posted a detailed cost breakdown: $1800. He estimates spending 30 hours researching on sites like CNCzone. The build time for the mechanical side was around 50 hours. The electrical system hasn’t been hoooked up yet, so look for that in a future post. It looks like an incredible machine already, so we can’t wait to see what’s next.

CNC Milling Gun Parts

June 3, 2008 by 31 Comments


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.

Lumenlab’s New Kit: Open Source CNC

May 23, 2008 by 12 Comments


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.

PCB Milling Hell Sunday Extra

March 30, 2008 by 18 Comments


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.