Hey all you tinkerers and DIYers, have i got a treat for you tonight.
After two days of coffee fueled futzing, i have come up with my first multi use mill.
This is a rough draft i plan to expand on. I'm going to tackle the same project on a bigger scale.
Made out of 100% recycled computer parts, that would undoubtedly would end up in a landfill or third world country.
I have not got down to working with cnc and cad software yet.
This project was inspired by some youtube videos. I found his instructions were not quite correct.
So i have fixed them here in the thread. I used his videos as reference material and worked out the kinks myself.
Your mileage may vary. I still recommend watching them for some good info.
Richard Harris Youtube
Made out of 100% recycled computer parts, that would undoubtedly would end up in a landfill or third world country.
Parts list
3 floppy disk drives bipolar stepper controllers
3 cd/dvd rom/burner the hind with bipolar stepper motors
1 ide ribbon cable to section and use later
1 computer power supply working and some broken ones for floppy power connectors
1 Parallel port from a motherboard
Tools
Soldering iron
Screw drivers
Hot glue gun/epoxy
Pliers
Software for testing. Win 98/XP
Parmon
PSU
Cut the green wire and insert it into any black wire or put a switch inline between the same.
Floppy power connectors
Take your floppy drive power connectors, match the colors and solder them together to form a 3 way pigtail.
Floppy Controller
Wires added from the ide ribbon cable to the original locations for the stepper motor and light sensor, on the floppy controller board.
Just match the original wire order to the replacement.
Cd rom sled X3
Attach wires from floppy drive controller to stepper motor. 1234-1234 If you get it wrong it wont hurt anything.
Place light sensor on the frame and a plastic tab or zip pie part on the sled to insert into sensor at end of sled travel.
Light sensor
Explained above.
Data connections.
Solder pins 11 and 12 together on the floppy controller or use a jumper from the cd roms
Pins 18 and 20 are direction and step (respectively)
Pins 17 and 19 for the grounds.
Parallel port pinout
Use pins 2-9 for direction and step respectively for each axis.
Use pins 18-25 for the grounds. The order dont matter on them.
Parallel port
X and Z axis glued together.
Tool arm attached
Y axis sled attached
Working table installed
I stacked all my controller boards on the rear and glued them, making sure no components would touch and short out.
Hello
Some manual action using parmon to toggle the axises.
Video
(Video wont embed)
I had a couple technical glitches along the way, i didn't edit them out of the video.
Learning is all part of the process.
Remember that you can make anything your heart desires with a little patience and an open mind.
If you want to tackle this, feel free to get a hold of me with questions.
Stay tuned for V2.0
Hope you enjoyed.
edit on 1/24/2014 by shaneslaughta because: (no reason given)
edit on 1/24/2014 by shaneslaughta because: (no reason
given)