New ... Stuff ... Learnt.

 Have had a busy few days.

My Arduino CNC V3 board arrived a while ago but just sat idle until ... a handful of A4988 drivers turned up. Yayy!

And THIS is what life's like here. Buy something, plan and plan and plan because - can't afford the next bits just yet this week... Then those bits arrive and you can - plan some more until . . . Well actually, this time I had a couple of  24BYJ48 5V stepper motors salvaged out of an IP camera and an install of LaserGRBL. 

(Thinking of purchasing those items? Please see this note.)

There she is plugged into an Arduino and
populated with driver modules. Go me!

My 24BYJ's came with some tiny little connectors on them which are no use on this setup so I had to take a short diversion into stepper motor configurations and connections, and found out that I have to modify them by cutting a track inside the stepper motor itself. But a quick look at the internals got me realising that leaving the centre taps jumpered together would only result in warmer windings and far less power so for the moment it's been left connected. 

I used spare bits of header connector to make this "modular
lead" approach to the problem - I could test that it worked.

The dinky cables I made with some leftover CAT5 core wires and bits of circuit board header connectors. By putting a disconnect rather than just soldering the leads to length, I have a modular system that's a bit more flexible.

The instructions for making a Uno talk GRBL natively made my brain hurt so here's the simple version: LaserGRBL actually includes an option to upload GRBL onto the board but I wasn't sure if it'd be the latest version so I took a pill and soldiered on. Basically you grab the GRBL firmware code from its home on github, unzip it, and then install the 'grbl' folder as a library to the Arduino IDE, then run the included sketch. 

The sketch is empty except for a library call and apparently you don't mess with anything but just upload it. 

A few seconds more and a COM port appeared in LaserGRBL so I hit connect and kacked myself at the loud beep. But it was working. A bit dodgy moving the steppers because of that aforementioned copper trace connecting the centretaps together - but it worked! 

Since I scored a few good online surveys and panels on Tuesday I had forty bucks burning a hole in my Paypal so I bought a set of three 42-40 stepper motors and hopefully this'll be the start of a CNC two-axis device of some sort and the basis for a simple CNC router, engraver, or cutter of some sort so that I can cut circuit boards for developing the next steps. 

And that's it for now, another experiment on the way to a project, which will now have to be put on hold until a) those steppers arrive (and then some aluminium extrusion for frames) and b) the landlord having electricians come to rewire some old out of code wiring which will take everything off the air for a while. 

I have a favour to ask, please share this link around if you liked it, because after almost 20 years of blogging my advertising revenue has finally risen to the point where I can collect my first ever advertising income! 

If it gives you any ideas for projects, if you want to keep current with my posts here and on my other blogs, I've made several options available now - there's Ted's News Stand where there's a newsfeed to read and also a link to get a newsletter, there's now also a page that explains newsreaders and let you manage your news feed rather than have my newsletters clogging up your inbox, and lastly I've prepared an OPML that lets you add my blogs if you're already a newsletter aficionado.

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Purchasing Note: If you buy any of those items at the beginning of the article, they're using my affiliate links. It won't cost you a cent more but I'll get a few extra points to put towards my next parts. 

Or you can manually append my affiliate code (?4W08184785032014038H or &p=4W08184785032014038H depending if there's already a ? symbol) to the end of the URL, hit refresh and then buy. 

This will also work if you just append the relevant code to something else you're about to put in your Banggood cart, hit refresh, and THEN put it in the cart and buy... Just saying. It will guaranteed not cost you a cent more but it means the world to me.