{"id":260,"date":"2013-01-11T17:30:16","date_gmt":"2013-01-11T17:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antsnest.net\/blog\/?p=260"},"modified":"2013-01-11T17:30:16","modified_gmt":"2013-01-11T17:30:16","slug":"cnc-milling-machine-first-steps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.antsnest.net\/blog\/?p=260","title":{"rendered":"CNC Milling Machine First Steps"},"content":{"rendered":"

I bought a small Proxxon MF70 <\/a>milling machine last year to help out with a few modelling jobs here & there, but also with the aim of converting it to CNC control (or rather CN control to be pedantic).<\/p>\n

As an xmas present to myself I finally splashed out on a CNC conversion kit from www.ideegeniali.it<\/a> which included the stepper motors, motor mounting hardware and motor controller electronics. I’m using an old PC I never got around to throwing away as the ‘brains’. The controller uses an old style 25-way parallel port connection so I had to get an extra PCI parallel card as most motherboards don’t provide these any more (even ones from 2005!).<\/p>\n

I’m now starting on the very long path to undersanding how it all works, but a few days tinkering have got me as far as getting my first responses from the mill to some G-code which was really exciting!<\/p>\n

Rather than actually milling something and making a mess all over my computer desk where it currently resides, I just inserted a pencil lead in the chuck and got it to draw instead.<\/p>\n