Hi there,
I'm building a Plotter (CNC Machine) from old computer parts and an arduino, my objective is to reuse materials and spend the smallest amount of money possible.
I did some research and from what i found using an arduino seemed to be a good aproach (already had one).
I also identified that i need something to control the stepper motors and i found i could use a couple of drivers to do that.
So, enough talking, lets get to some action.
Material List :
- 1 Arduino UNO or MEGA (in my case it's a UNO)
- 3 Easydriver stepper drivers (v44)
- 2 steppers from old CD/DVD
- 1 stepper from old diskette drive (can be a CD/DVD too)
- Multimeter
- Soldering Iron
- Some wire
First Part :
Disassembly of an old CD/DVD drive
Should be straigh forward unscrewing the bolts until you get to the CD/DVD bed:
This is what you want to end up with (don't throw away the rest of the stuff left from the CD/DVD)
After that you want to focus on the four pins soldered to the motor, and with a multimeter just probe the pins until you get continuity (a sharp sound) you need to find and pair any 2 that sound "the bells".
After you find them just solder some jumper wires to identify them (i used red and black to each pair in sequence) as you can see on the next image :
Note : Be carefull not to solder the next pin because it will cause a short circuit and might ruin the driver or the stepper.
you need to do this twice (for both CD/DVD steppers) and also for the diskette drive motor.
Now choose one of the drive "beds" so we can build a structure to hold the plate to hold the material to print on.
For that i used a strip of styrofoam and split into 3 pieces roughly the same size so i can stack them.
Note : i could have user another material like wood, plastic etc.. but i want to get the weight to a bare minimum because these motors don't hold that much torque, and the lighter the faster they are. But feel free to use any other material with that in consideration.
And the final assembly looks like this
Now we need to get a flat surface to get on top of that as the tray.
The motion on the CD/DVD axis is roughly 40mm or 4cm (in my case it's 38mm) so i looked around and found a bit of plywood with 60mm square, wich is more than enough to be used as the tray like this
But before that lets get something to hold the paper down like a spring.
I found a small bit of aluminium foil about 1mm thick and chopped 2 pieces around 4cm.
Bend them a bit, drill a hole on the side and drill the wood and attached them together like this, and then hot glue the base to the styrofoam, make sure the holes have at least 55mm between them so you be left with a safe space for the head.
Ok guys, hope you find the stuff usefull so far, tommorow i will come back and edit with more stuff, i will try to have at least one of the axis ready so we can try it out.
I'm building a Plotter (CNC Machine) from old computer parts and an arduino, my objective is to reuse materials and spend the smallest amount of money possible.
I did some research and from what i found using an arduino seemed to be a good aproach (already had one).
I also identified that i need something to control the stepper motors and i found i could use a couple of drivers to do that.
So, enough talking, lets get to some action.
Material List :
- 1 Arduino UNO or MEGA (in my case it's a UNO)
- 3 Easydriver stepper drivers (v44)
- 2 steppers from old CD/DVD
- 1 stepper from old diskette drive (can be a CD/DVD too)
- Multimeter
- Soldering Iron
- Some wire
First Part :
Disassembly of an old CD/DVD drive
Should be straigh forward unscrewing the bolts until you get to the CD/DVD bed:
This is what you want to end up with (don't throw away the rest of the stuff left from the CD/DVD)
After that you want to focus on the four pins soldered to the motor, and with a multimeter just probe the pins until you get continuity (a sharp sound) you need to find and pair any 2 that sound "the bells".
After you find them just solder some jumper wires to identify them (i used red and black to each pair in sequence) as you can see on the next image :
Note : Be carefull not to solder the next pin because it will cause a short circuit and might ruin the driver or the stepper.
you need to do this twice (for both CD/DVD steppers) and also for the diskette drive motor.
Now choose one of the drive "beds" so we can build a structure to hold the plate to hold the material to print on.
For that i used a strip of styrofoam and split into 3 pieces roughly the same size so i can stack them.
Note : i could have user another material like wood, plastic etc.. but i want to get the weight to a bare minimum because these motors don't hold that much torque, and the lighter the faster they are. But feel free to use any other material with that in consideration.
And the final assembly looks like this
Now we need to get a flat surface to get on top of that as the tray.
The motion on the CD/DVD axis is roughly 40mm or 4cm (in my case it's 38mm) so i looked around and found a bit of plywood with 60mm square, wich is more than enough to be used as the tray like this
But before that lets get something to hold the paper down like a spring.
I found a small bit of aluminium foil about 1mm thick and chopped 2 pieces around 4cm.
Bend them a bit, drill a hole on the side and drill the wood and attached them together like this, and then hot glue the base to the styrofoam, make sure the holes have at least 55mm between them so you be left with a safe space for the head.
Ok guys, hope you find the stuff usefull so far, tommorow i will come back and edit with more stuff, i will try to have at least one of the axis ready so we can try it out.