It has been a wish for years, I already had all components in stock, and now I finally did it. I made a CNC control system for my Proxxon FF230 hobby mill. I finally got sick of having to use the handwheels and counting the number of rotations to get a profile or pocket of a certain size and shape. Most of the times it went OK, but I miscounted at least once on every work piece, resulting in a nicely milled part with a dent in the wrong place or an asymmetric square hole in it. Not anymore …. now I got it all automated. Only thing I need to do now is make a good CAD design on the PC, prepare the work piece and position the mill. Then upload the design and wait for the finished piece!
And as always, converting the mill was way easier than I expected. All I had to do was create a PCB (on the basis of the Protoneer Arduino CNC shield) to accomodate all motor controllers and some additional connectors for buttons and endstops, and create the brackets for the motors. I used an Arduino Uno as the controller and programmed it with the brilliant GRBL firmware. I make my designs in OpenSCAD and HeeksCAD, turn them into G-code, upload them with either the Universal Gcode Sender or GSat, and watch the motors turn.
