Hello my imaginary Internet friends. Welcome to my blog. The purpose of this site is to document a project of mine to build a functional CNC machine for under $500 total investment, not including basic hand/power tools used to assemble it. I doubt I am the first to accomplish this, but I hope to be a valuable resource to anyone considering the same project by illustrating one path to success. In my early research I found there to be so many people building homebrew CNC machines that the choices were overwhelming, and in many cases scattered all over the place. It was also difficult to determine the quality of the end results people were getting. Someone built a gantry out of plywood, and someone else built a scratch motor controller for their steel gantry. So how good would the end results of that motor controller be on a plywood gantry? Since there was no single-source documenting starting from scratch and ultimately showing a functioning machine and the resulting work product for a $500 CNC machine, I decided to do it myself and give a little back to the community.
So there you go. This blog will start with product selection and links to where I ordered them, continue on to kit assembly and electronics, and wrap up with my preferred software stack and some alternatives for folks running on different platforms or with slightly different design goals. In the end you'll see finished work product and if it meets your needs you'll have a recipe for replicating it. Hope you enjoy!
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