How I built the Simplest CNC Machine with minimum parts possible | DIY Laser Engraver

hello dan here from howtomechatronics.com in this video i will show you how i build the simplest cnc machine with minimum parts possible and without using a 3d printer that's right i've been using 3d printers for most of my recent projects because of course they are great for prototyping as we can easily make any shape we want with them however not everyone has a 3d printer so therefore i wanted to show you that we can also make stuff even without the help of 3d printers or other cnc machines i will show you how i built this cnc machine by using just a single power tool a drill and several hand tools the material that i used for this build is eight millimeters mdf board which is actually quite strong and probably more rigid than a 3d printed pla material and at the same time it's easy to work with for this video i will use this cst machine as a laser engraver and in a future video i plan to make it work as a pen plotter obviously this type of construction of the machine cannot provide much rigidity so we cannot use it as a cnc router or a mill though if we attach a more powerful laser we could use it to cut various materials like for example this mdf board that we are using here or other type of wood boards and with quite good accuracy the working area is quite big 390 by 360 millimeters and the level of details that this engraver can produce is pretty impressive to be honest i was surprised how good the engravings turned out the brain of this cnc machine is an arduino uno board in combination with a cnc shield but more details about that as well as how to prepare your drawings or images for laser engraving make g-codes and control the machine using free open-source programs a bit later in the video i started by designing the machine using solidworks for makers the two main components of this cnc machine are these amg and 15h linear rails together with their suitable sliding blocks for driving the blocks or the two axis we are using two nema 70 stepper motors and some suitable gt2 pulleys and timing belts for connecting everything together we are using eight millimeters mdf board and for homing the machine to micro limit switches and that's it a cnc machine with minimum parts possible you can find and download this 3d model of this cnc machine on the website article the link is in the video description before we start building the machine let's take a look at this video sponsor raid shadow legends raid shadow legend is an exciting turn-based rpg game which has a whole world of amazing looking champions all from their own unique faction and those factions have a lot of lord use my links below to download raid yourself to your mobile or pc you can't have a fantasy world without wars and ray shadow legends doesn't disappoint these guys look really cool the faction has a lot of variety and design details there are evil looking ones nobles barmaids sorcerers it feels like a whole society my favorite champion from the dwarfs is storming the cold what 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3d model now i will cut the pieces to size for that purpose i used the simplest possible method a pencil for marking where i needed to cut and a hand saw for cutting them of course it requires some effort to cut all the pieces by hand but still we can get them pretty nice and clean even with this method once i cut all pieces to size i moved with making the holes on them making the holes precisely is actually more important than cutting the pieces the holes positions must be very precise as they have to fit with the other parts which have precise and fixed dimensions like the linear rails and the stepper motors the central plate where the y-axis and the stepper motors are mounted has many holes and in order to get them right i printed a drawing of the part in real size normal printers are easily accessible to everyone so i thought it wouldn't be a cheating if i used one for building this project in this way we can position the part in the drawing and mark the location of the holes then we can drill the holes although this doesn't mean that we will get them a hundred percent accurate we are still doing the job by hand so we have to be very concentrated and patient to get them right we need three and five millimeters drill as well as one 25 millimeter drill for making the opening of the stepper motor next i continued with assembling the base of the machine on which the x-axis rail will be secured for that purpose i marked the position where the rail support part should be fixed and drilled two holes on the base part and one hold on the support part then i secure these two parts together with the first three millimeter screw and some wood glue with the first screw in place i checked for squareness and then pre-drilled the second hole on the support material with a two millimeter drill in similar way i added two brackets for better support to be honest this method of assembling these mdf parts is not that good as it's hard to get them square as everything we do is by hand and the mdf boards are just eight millimeters thick which additionally complicates the process maybe a better and easier way would be to use metal brackets which can be easily found in a hardware store nevertheless once i had the two sides ready i installed the x axis rail to them these mgn 15h rails provide very smooth and play free movement as their sliding blocks have balls or rollers inside them before installing them though we should clean and grease them well i secure the linear rail in place with two entry bolts on each side next we need to install the y-axis on top of the x-axis sliding block for that purpose we will use the central plate again we are using m3 bolts for securing the parts together for securing the stepper motors in place we also need aim triples in addition to that for one of the steppers i am using some distant nuts in order to get a proper mounting height for it though i probably could have mounted this stepper on the bottom side of the plate and so we wouldn't have to use these distance nuts for driving the x-axis we need to install two gt2 idler pulleys near the stepper shaft so that we can create a proper tension between the belt and the stepper pulley we need m5 bolts and nuts for securing them as for the y-axis we only need one idler pulley on the other side of the rail as the belt for this axis will be installed in a loop alright so next is the marriage for connecting the x and the y axis rails together we do that using 4 m3 bolts this connection is very important to be precise as the precision of the whole machine depends on it using a square ruler we must check whether the two axis are perpendicular to each other and if not we should adjust them properly next we can install the parts which go on the y-axis sliding block and actually hold the end effector or the laser module in this case using the method shown earlier i assembled the parts and secured them to the sliding block using four entry bolts now we can secure the laser module in place with two m3 bolts i continued with installing the gt2 belts i measured how much length i needed and cut the belt to size for securing the belt to the sliding block i used two m5 bolts and some zip ties i secured the first side of the belt to the m5 bolt with a zip tie and then tensioned the belt on the other side and secured it to the second bolt using another zip tie as for the x-axis the belt will be stretched in a line from one to the other side while passing through the three pulleys in a way that will provide tension or grip with the stepper motor pulley i secured the belt on both sides with a single bolt and a square mdf piece with this our machine is almost done there are a few more things that we need to do at the bottom side i glued some furniture pads so that the machine stays more firmly in place then i install the micro limit switch for the y-axis we need two aim2 bolts for securing them in place as for the x-axis limit switch i forgot to make those holes on the central plate so i marked them and drilled them on site it was a bit tight securing this limit switch in place but at the end it came out well the mechanical part of this machine is now completed and we can move on with connecting the electronics components as i mentioned we will use an arduino uno board in combination with a cnc shield and two drv8825 or a4988 stepper drivers i will secure the arduino board on the side of the machine so i marked two holes and drilled them with a three millimeters drill i used a five millimeter distance nut between the side panel and the arduino board the cnc shield simply goes on top of the arduino board we need to insert three jumpers for each stepper driver so that we have the highest tipping resolution selected please note here that these three jumpers should be removed as we don't need them i used them in one of my previous projects next we can connect the stepper motors in place with the provided cables for connecting the limit switches we need two wires connection i soldered the one end of the wires directly to the end stops and on the other side i soldered female pin headers so i can easily connect them to the cnc shield as for connecting the laser module we need three wires ground 12 volts and a signal line for the pwm control these wires need to be a bit longer so they can reach the first point of the machine on one side we have the tripping connector that goes in the laser module and on the other side we have the ground and the 12 volts wires that will go to the power supply connector of the cnc shield and the signal line that needs to be connected to the z plus or z minus and stop pin here's a circuit diagram of how everything needs to be connected with this we are actually done with assembling the machine what's left to do now is to give life to it or make it a real cnc machine for that purpose we need to install a firmware to the arduino for controlling the motion of the cnc machine the most popular choice for diy cnc machines is the open source gerber firmware in addition to the gerbil firmware we also need a control software through which we will send g-codes and tell the machine what to do in this case we will use the laser gripple controller this software is specifically made for controlling laser engravers with the gerbil firmware and i can tell you that it's really an amazing controller for that purpose considering it's also open source with laser gurbal we have an option to directly flash or upload the gerbil firmware to the arduino so we don't have to do that manually we can even choose a ready to use version for two axis machines with just x and y homing just like the one we need so once we flash our arduino with the gerbil firmware we can connect our machine to the controller and open the gerbil configuration window so we can adjust some parameters according to our machine the first thing that we should adjust here is the travel resolution or the steps per millimeter values for the x and the y axis these values indicate how many steps the motor should take in order to move one millimeter this depends on the type of the stepper motor that we have the selected step resolution and the motion transmission in this case the gt2 belts and the pulley here's how we can calculate these values for our machine the default values here are usually 250 steps per millimeter now we can move the machine using the jog commands for example 20 millimeters and we should notice how much the machine will actually move in my case for 20 millimeters jog on the y-axis the actual movement of the machine was 31 millimeter so 20 divided by 31 equals 0.645 and if we multiply that value with 250 we will get a value of 161.29 so that's the value that we should set as steps per millimeter value for our machine if we try to move the machine now with the updated values the machine should move the exact distance nevertheless there are other important parameters that need to be adjusted as well for example we should enable the hard limits which are the actual limit switches soft limits which defines the working area set the homing direction which defines where our limits features are located on the machine and so on you can find more details about all these parameters on the website as well as download my set of parameters so you can just import them into your firmware another great thing about this software is that it has a built-in gcode generator this means that we can load any photo clip art pencil drawing and so on directly into the software and we can generate a g-code for engraving according to our needs the rastering image tool is quite versatile with many options to choose like selecting line-to-line tracing vectorizing one bit black and white deterring etc of course if you want you can also generate g-codes with other software like for example inkscape and it's plugging inkscape laser tools for generating g-codes and load them here i already explained how to use this method for generating g-codes in my previous video for the scara robot laser engraver so for more details you can check that video out now i will show you how you can generate g-code for laser engraving from a photo using laser gerbil here i have a photo of a dock which i will open with the software using the brightness and the contrast options we can adjust the image to our desire we can choose the type of conversion of the photo for example line to line tracing one bit black and white deterring a vector format and so on i will use line to line tracing for this photo and here we can also select the line direction and the quality of the engraving which is defined by how many lines per millimeter there will be next we can select the engraving speed set the minimum and maximum pwm values for the laser power and set the size of the engraving and that's it the software will now generate the g-code for this engraving before we start the engraving we can use the frame button to outline or show us where the engraving will take place so we can adjust our workpiece as needed please note that we must use laser safety goggles that will protect our eyes from the ultraviolet light of the laser if we have calibrated our machine correctly we can get quite good engravings for calibrating we could use this image that i made which has squares from 100 to 10 transparency and according to the results adjust the engraving speed and pwm values for the laser power and that's it for this video i hope you enjoyed it and learned something new if you have any questions feel free to ask them in the comment section below thanks for watching and for more tutorials and projects visit howtomechatronics.com

Channel: How To Mechatronics

Views: 488,453

Keywords: Arduino, Laser Engraver, DIY, CNC, CNC Machine, GRBL, LaserGRBL, DIY Laser Engraver, DIY CNC

Id: td4DWtMY7SQ

Length: 17min 6sec (1026 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021