Right then...

Ok, so it's been a while. The Zen Toolworks kit showed up and I built it. More on that later. I had quite the ordeal getting a grblShield, but the folks at Synthetos are good guys and came through in the end. Got it all wired up, and it actually worked! But after a few minutes the controllers began going into what I assume was thermal shutdown, and the motors made the most horrific noises during that process. I likened it to tossing a block of aluminum in a woodchipper. Turns out my crappy salvaged PC power supply wasn't cutting it. As I mentioned earlier, you don't need much power... but the unregulated 12V line was sagging to 11V and below, and the drivers/motors couldn't handle that. So I went off and bought a proper 24V regulated 15A power supply (This one, though I see it's indefinitely unavailable now, that's a good omen). This of course kills the whole $500 target if you're buying everything from scratch, so this blog will be hereinafter "Zero to CNC in $500ish". In my case I had an Arduino kicking about and the Rotozip as well, so technically I'm still under $500, but I know you dear reader may not be. Sorry about that. As a dear friend once told me, "we like to call that lessons learned in DIY land."