Ben,
You can make a machine like what you are describing very inexpensively. I
made a CNC 3 axis machine for drilling my PCBs in 1997. You can make a
fairly accurate machine with 3 stepper motors, a controller board, drawer
slides, some type of drill like a dremel or similar and software that uses
the parallel port. I wrote my own software in Visual Basic as the generic
shareware programs took too long to set up for what I wanted to do. The
stepper shafts are just connected to threaded stock. A nut attached to the
table moves back and forth via the threaded stock spinning clockwise or
counterclockwise via the number of steps your computer commands. You can get
the stepper motors from several places online. I have dealt with Dan Mauch
of Camtronics on previous projects. You can get the motors and controller at
his site
http://www.seanet.com/~dmauch/ He has also built the device
that you are describing and reports good results.
You can get information on the parallel port from
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ih/doc/par/ but beware this link is sometimes down.
A book that will become your bible on this project is "Controlling the World
With Your PC" by Paul Bergsman. ISBN# 1-878707-15-9. I think the list price
of the book is $29.95. This book gives you all the descriptive information,
schematics, and sample code in Basic, Pascal and C.
BTW- I am not affiliated with any of the references I gave here. These are
just the sources that helped me the most when I did my project.
Good luck.
-Mike
----- Original Message -----
From: "ben_englund" <ben_englund@...>
To: <Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, June 28, 2003 6:44 PM
Subject: [Homebrew_PCBs] Re: cnc pcb engraver
> I have done some searching and it seems like all I have seen are too
> high priced. I know I would never even pay $1k for this, let alone
> $2.5k I have been thinking about this for a while and I think it can
> be done much cheaper while keeping it accurate and reliable. I just
> wanted to get some opinions on how much effort I should put into
> designing such an animal. First I would include stepper motors
> (possibly used), power supply, and controllers(x,y, and z axis) to
> hook to a pc parallel port. I would only include "free" software or
> maybe shareware. It would have a maximum accuracy of 2000 steps per
> inch. Runout on the slides would be .001" or less and would use acme
> screws for the drive. Spindle motor would either be included or just
> accept a "dremel" type of tool.
>
>
> I personally feel that much of America has become overpriced due to
> too many office personel and salesmen. I would like to be part of
> the solution instead of the problem. This is just one of my many
> ongoing projects(most of them in my head) to try and make this world
> more bearable.
>
> Sorry, I'm just babling on....
>
> Ben Englund
>
>
>
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