Hello, longtime reader, first time poster and hopefully soon to be member.
I have a project that I have been working on and was hoping someone with more knowledge could give some advice.
Long story short, I bought an CNC engraving machine circa 1999 ish. It came with a PC (Windows 98) that wouldn’t boot. I was able to fix the PC and it has an old version of EngaveLab on it. I even had it working with the CNC to run tests. BUT after getting it running I of course could leave it alone and broke it. The game plan was to find a way to have a modern laptop to driver the CNC. During this I managed to mess something up one of the boards in the CNC. After that the plan switched to retrofitting the machine to use an Arduino with CNC Shield to run GRBL. I was hoping to use the current power supply (36v) and motors.
Where I’m now/stuck is basically all the steps for calibrating the Arduino. Stepper Motor Divers (Current limit), Setting the Jumpers for Mico stepping (I think), calculating the threaded rod movement, etc.
The Big question is am I heading down the right road with Arduino or should I be going a different route?
Any feedback, advice, comments would be greatly appreciated and thank you in advance.
Welcome! It looks like you’ve got the right idea. GRBL is great for small CNC machines like yours. If you have any specific questions feel free to ask, we have a number of members who are familiar with setting up GRBL. A couple of the machines at the makerspace use it.
Coincidentally, I have a (probably much older) dahlgren engraver that I’ve been sporadically working on refurbishing and replacing the controller.
Glad you said that Christian. I have a bunch of parts for a cnc machine that’s based on GRBL I too started second guessing my decision.
We should all plow forward with these and have a CNC section at makerfair next year.
2020 is Exploration Places 20th anniversary and Sedgwick County and Wichita’s 150th anniversary. Look for more info about the celebrations that will be included in Maker Faire to be forthcoming