Transferring thoughts to your world

I’ve been wanting a small CNC machine to make PCBs for quite some time now. Since many of the boards I make only need artwork on a single side (the other side is ground plane) a CNC would be a great prototyping tool.

A while back I picked up some one else’s project, which included a nice XY table, a Z axis gantry above it, and a very nice stepper motor controller. Unfortunately, the stepper motor controller is all but useless unless you want to write a g code interpreter for it.

So I grabbed an Arduino from the stock bin, loaded up grbl on it, ordered up three EasyDriver stepper motor drivers from SparkFun, tossed it all in a box, shook hard, and out comes a nice three axis stepper motor controller. Now to put it all together with a PC power supply and hook it up to the CNC and try to make a few things!

Pictures to follow.