Week 12, 13 - CNC Machine

Hardware

In last two weeks our task was to make a CNC machine in team consisting of 7 people. We decided to make CNC machine that allows us to paint on cylindrical objects.

We devided to multiple groups and each group was responsible for certain part of project. I decided to join group responsible for hardware and software.

First we used following parts to move our CNC machine:

2 Stepper motors NEMA 17 17HS4401 0.4Nm

Stepper motor NEMA 17 17HS3401 0.28Nm

CNC command board, 3 axes, 2A

3 Limit switches (2A 125VAC)

Cables

Then we mounted motors on propper parts of our machine, so one was on x axis to rotate witch our object...

...other was on top of our machine to move with y axis....

... and the last one was on the head of our machine.

After that we set current to each stepper motor to 1.5A on each motor driver and connect each component to CNC command board.

Software

GRBL setting

Our cnc is controled by command board running GRBl software.

First we need to set parameters of our CNC machine, such as steps/mm, speed and limits.

We used GRBL panel to set our parameters, which can be seen on next image. Tutorial on how to set up everything can be found on team website of our project.

Making of Gcode files

For making our gcode we used Inkscape software with Gcodetools extension. Propper tutorial can be again found on our team website.

Controlling of our CNC machine

For control of our machine we used OpenBuilds software to send gcode to our machine. I recommend this software because it is easy to use and also you can see current progress on visualisation. Usage is simple, just open your gcode file and hit send.