By Fritz Weinrebe on 24 January 2010

Today I did what I wanted to do for a few months now.  I connected the CNC controller board to the power supply and connected the 3 stepper motors as well.  After blowing 2 fuses on the 230V side of the power supply, I realised they might be the fast blowing type. 

After a few tweaks in Mach 3, I finally got the answer I needed. It works!!! So why all this excitement? The controller card was bought in a kit format and I had to solder every part onto the card myself.  The kit is a 3 axis card from HobbyCNC in the USA.

Well now I just have to complete the last step in building the CNC.  Mount the motors, get the wiring done neatly and mount the home and limit switches.  Then I should be able to see it in real action.  Can't wait.

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By Fritz Weinrebe on 12 January 2010

To date I have tried my best to create quality work on my sim.  But with DIY tools and amateur skills one can only reach a certain level of craftmanship. Unless you get a CNC.

Since buying a CNC Router or Mill or even a CO2 laser CNC is out of my reach, I've decided to build one myself.  I got 2 plans from the Internet and combined the 2 into my own 'design'.  The CNC Router is a combination between the commercial Rockcliff A Model and the free jgro cnc plan. And a few ideas of my own. Below is just some of the pictures I took.

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By Fritz Weinrebe on 11 January 2010

I started work on the PC9M GPS screen.  Below is a screenshot of the progress so far.  It currently displays the route information read from the active FSX *.pln file.

A lot of GPS related information is available from SimConnect and lot is not.  For those unavailable features I will probably have to write my own code.  Looks like the GPS will be a beast to program.

 

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