Most of the machine is made out of either aluminum or acrylic. These materials are both easy to work with when all you have available is various hand tools and a drill press with a cross slide vise. The motors are NEMA 23 high torque, the threaded rods are 1/2-10 precision ACME and the nuts are anti-backlash. This results in pretty decent X-Y movement. I made the slides from extruded aluminum profiles available at the hardware store and some strips of Teflon.

I made all of the electronics that support the machine. I made the optical home and limit switches, as well as both parallel port interface boards. I also assembled the stepper motor drivers and built power filters/regulators for the input to the stepper motor drives on all three axes. This prevents inductive feedback spikes from the motors ruining the stepper motor control ICs. I need this because I’m running the motors at 48VDC and the controller IC has an absolute maximum voltage rating of 60VDC. I also wanted to keep any switching noise and voltage dips from the switch-mode power supply out of the stepper drives. Each filter has a FET-regulated output that clamps the voltage and then sends it out to some big capacitors to prevent the voltage from dropping.

The parallel interface boards completely isolate the controlling PC from the drives and other electronics. Buffers handle all the appropriate levels and opto-isolators keep the ports safe.

I’ve run it extensively with TurboCNC, but I don’t get any of the limit and home functionality because TurboCNC only supports legacy port addresses, and most parallel port PCI cards can’t map to legacy addresses. This leaves me with only the one on-board parallel port, which is mostly used up by the 3 axis step and direction signals. It works in Mach3 CNC, but I can’t afford to buy that program right now. So I’ve used it in evaluation mode for doing simple text engraving on plastics and acrylic. Oddly enough I couldn’t get it to work at all in Mach2. The pulse train output to the stepper drives was inconsistent enough that the motors would stall. I even tried it on a few different computers, one of which was a brand new XP install.

The machine mostly cranks out PC boards thanks to Eagle CAD and PCB2GCode. I’ve made quite a few since the machine was finished. It does a pretty good job, and holds flatness to a couple thousandths. It’s enough to get routine 0.020″ isolation on traces and pads, and clean 0.012″ trace widths. It’s a bit slow because of the low-buck slides, the motors stall if I speed it up much. It’s not exactly a high precision machine, so I can live with slow.

I’ve got some better parts since I built this one, and I’m planning on building another one with much better accuracy in the near future. This machine won’t handle the fine traces necessary to make boards with the newer components.

Here’s a video of the machine in action:

You can see more videos at youtube: imsolidstate’s CNC machine