m (Bpopp moved page CNC to BPCNC)
(No difference)

Revision as of 14:51, 21 April 2016

I've been wanting to build a CNC machine for a while, but have gotten distracted by various other things. I finally did a minimal amount of research and bought some stepper motors and a controller. I honestly jumped into this pretty quick, though, and didn't spend a lot of time researching what I was buying. I'll update this as I learn more about what I bought and, more than likely, what I should have bought instead.

Research

  • [1] - Nice instructional video for setting up a RAMPS controller

Parts

Controller

I started with this controller:

It's about $39 and includes:

  • 1 x 1.4 RAMPS Arduino Shield
  • 1x MEGA 2560 R3 16mhz Clone
  • 4x A4988 Stepper Driver rated at 1A and cooling with up to 2A, Note: this board now comes with heat sinks.
  • 1x 12864 LCD Screen with board with SD card interface

I guess it was a mistake, but they actually sent me 5 drivers. I won't have extruders, so apparently I only need 3, but I guess I'll have a couple extra in case I burn one up.

Motors

For motors, I went with NEMA 23 269oz stepper motors:

I paid about $80 for 3. Most of the other build I've seen go a little bigger, but hopefully they should work okay for the X and Y access. If anything, I may just need something a little heftier for the Z axis.

Setup

The RAMPS 1.4 controller setup involved:

  • Join arduino/ramps.
  • Add heatsinks to drivers
  • Add jumpers to controller. For each stepper driver, there are 3 jumpers (6 pins). For 1/16th precision (recommended), configuration should be:
    • Low end A4988 Driver: xxx (1 jumper on each set of pins)
    • High end DRV8825 Driver: 00x (1 jumper on the far right pin)
  • Install drivers in the XYZ positions
  • Install LCD adapter and LCD
  • Download Marlin firmware
  • Configure Marlin firmware
    • Uncomment "#define REPRAP_DISCOUNT_FULL_GRAPHIC_SMART_CONTROLLER"
    • Install u8glib library in Arduino IDE
    • Compile and upload
  • Download "Printrun-Win-Slic3r-10Mar2014" (user interface for RAMPS)
  • Apply USB power and run Printrun

I'm currently getting a temperature sensor error and the compiler won't let me disable that sensor. Currently researching how to work around this since I don't think I need a temperature sensor.

Note: Fixed by adding a 100ohm resistor on T0