The Sherline Lathe is running on Turbocnc. It is connected but not in what should be a permanent manner. Wires are dangling and enclosures are not enclosed. But the joy of it is that the Machine works. I mades squares and circles on paper by using the carriage as a x-y table under a separate drill press that was there to awkwardly hold a marker. It was joy to have the efforts culminate into some thing that works and shows so much potential to work as it was planned.
I ordered the Sherline Motor Mounts for the Milling Machine Sunday Nov 26, the fedex ship delivery estimate is Dec 5. I think it is the xmas slowdown. 1.5 weeks it will be. The lathe mounts took a week. I have other things to do and that is fine. I may even get the motor mount holes drilled and tapped before I get the mounts.
The future goal will be to make the milling machine operational on a basic level. Since everything is kit form, I may leave it a bit "messy" so I will have more flexibility to change it to be more functional as I get a better feel for the actual operational needs. I am not inclined to invest more effort than neccesary it things I might change, but the investment in time into the basic necessary functionality of having it run is obviously unavoidable.
I came across a makeblog on
fabathome.org It is a promising machine. The machine is a "fabber", basically the idea is to make the technology easy enough for people to make stuff at home. An ambitious idea, delicate and sweet and probably more ideals than practicality. That said, a pretty good show!
I was gratified to see they used the same choice of motor control that I picked for my cnc conversion which is the xylotex board. The enclosure they use is a project in itself to build of course. And uses lasercut acrylic, it looks very cool. Interestingly they use a usb converter to run the parallel port driven motor controller. I am not sure why though, there are plenty of parallel ports still on computer and on plenty of obsolete computers that would be able to run something like this. After all that is the strategy behind turbocnc. I suspect it is to offload the work of running the stepper motor control board to the Olimex microprocessor to make the programming on the computer simpler. That is a good reason. They use a
Olimex LPC-H2148 Microcontroller Board
which is $39.95. Also "needed" (I guess you could make one yourself) is a nice breakout board, the
Winford_BRK25F-Breakout_Board is $19.50.
They got the job done, but I want to point out that that is about $60 of hardware, and extra setup time, versus just using the included parallel port connection to the xylotex board. Even if you have a computer sans parallel port you can get a pci
parallel port board for about $15. All things being equal (and of course they are not) the $45 in pocket would be nice. And I believe you need to get the Olimex microprocessor programmed also.
The heart of the fab@home system is the software, I don't know enough about comparable open source programs, but if the sofware is good it will be very helpful in making a FDM like machine. Also the syringe "extrusion" toolhead is interesting.
Another Kudos fof the fab@home is that the software is open source. I have not looked at it yet but it sounds like they are on the right track.
We have a Dimension BST 1200 Fusion Deposition Modelling Machine at work and that is basically what the fab@home is trying to duplicate. (with some compromises of course) Without the $20,000 pricetag.
