|
Wow, this has been an exciting experience.
It all
started in 1999 when I wanted a machine to automate
the drilling process of the PCB's for the various
electronic projects I was making. After some brief
research I jumped in, head first and after a couple of
months I had what can be seen in the photo below.
 The
machine used old ballbearing drawer slides, acme-screws
with bronze nuts, and a Dremel as the spindle. I looked
for some fairly priced stepperdrives for a long time but
eventually decided to build my own based on the L297-298
combo. Looking back on the whole project the drives was
probably the best part of the whole machine.
If interested you can
download
the schematics etc for that driver.
Here's a shot of an
engraving I did with the machine. The 'artwork' were
made with CorelDraw and the machine was run by a program
called Stepster which I believe was one of the very few
available PC-CNC programs at the time. (Excluding EMC
for linux).
The
machine did what I first wanted it do but by the time I
was finished with it I had come up with so much stuff I
wanted to do with it that I immedatly knew I wanted
another one. Besides that - I love building stuff. So
with a bit more knowledge of what CNC is and
 with
recent (at that time) access
to some decent machinery I started the design and
manufacturing of this baby.
Yet a few
years down the road I stumbled across an Abene VHF-3
that was previosuly converted to CNC but was now lacking
the control. You can read more about that adventure
here.
|
