Mekanika did a great job providing easy-to-understand instructions, starting with the assembly video and small things like color-coded cables or a spacer for easy alignment. Let’s now talk about the reason why I think that this CNC router might be one of the best solutions for someone who doesn’t have experience with machining. While you set up your job, you can disable them, but that will lose your homing position and squaring procedure. Just a quick note here – the stepper motors are powered by default and have a really whiny, high pitch sound, even in idle, which drove me crazy. Nothing on the inside should and needs to be touched, and all the IO is routed to connectors on the outside. All of that is running on a Raspberry Pi that sits in the electronics enclosure together with a 24V power supply, the PlanetCNC control board, and the stepper motor drivers.
Planet cnc usb controller touchscreen software#
The software and hardware running on the EVO is from PlanetCNC, which comes with good documentation if you need to research G-Codes or cycles. Even though the touchscreen is not huge, I was able to control most things without big problems, but if you’re not a fan of the touch interface or have thick fingers, you can also just plug in a mouse. That’s all really nice because you don’t need to bring your laptop to the shop and get it all dirty. The interface lets you change settings, watch the job’s progress, or just browse around on the Linux system. You load your G-Code files via USB, or you can even set up a shared network folder using WiFi connectivity. Then there is a touchscreen next to it which lets you control the rest of the machine. The control panel is basically half a keyboard with custom stickers used for the machine’s general control, like jogging it or typing custom G-Code commands. I screwed the big emergency stop button to the front as well as the control panel with the touchscreen. As said before, all the wiring and crimping is pre-made, and I just had to route the cables through the cable chains and plug them into the motors and switches and the color-coded connectors into the separate electronics enclosure I placed under my machine. Since the end stop position is adjustable you can very easily and automatically square the gantry that way. Since the machine uses stepper motors that don’t have any positional feedback, there is a mechanical end stop for each of the axes. As we’ll see in a bit – the design works for its intended application, but there are wider belts available, which would require a different integration but would have made the machine just a bit more rigid. I mean, this router is primarily designed to machine wood and doesn’t need the stiffness of a metal mill, but it just looks a bit disproportional. This setup has the benefit that the router can move really fast, and it eliminates backlash but adds a bit of softness into the axes. The longer x and y axes don’t use lead screws but get driven by conventional timing belts. Two are on the y-axis, one on the x-axis and one drives the trapezoidal leadscrew used on the z-axis.
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