Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Homebrew PCBs
Subject: Questions about building a CNC machine
From: "Bob Weiss" <BWeiss@...>
Date: 2004-11-14
I know there is another Yahoo group for this but I can't get my
messages to post there for some reason and was hoping someone here
has experience with this...
I am currently working on building my own CNC machine and I've been
researching this board and the net for about a week and I've got
some basic questions and was hoping someone here can lend me a hand?
1) I use Eagle to layout my PCB's and I outputed a job using the CAM
processor and choose Gerber as the output format. The file it
produced is formated like:
X007708Y008148D02∗
The file is in inches and I was wondering how to do you read this?
Is it telling the machine to move the drill to X coordinate 007708
from the home (0) position? If so is .007708 inches away or
something else?
2) The first line in the file is x=0 and y=0 in the format above, I
am assuming its telling the drill to move to home position first.
How do you determine where that point is on a board? Is it the top
left hand corner of the board looking down on it?
3) Which axis is the X axis? I mean, is the one that moves left to
right when looking at the machine from the front?
Thanks for any help you can give...