Our Danish friends David Pedersen and the guys from AC/KW got together and built a CNC machine
from scratch. There are lots of videos and pictures of the build on the site. Have a look at the
3D Hacked Gadgets logo, this machine does a great job!
“The CNC mill has been built from scratch. We’ve even made our own controller board to drive
the stepper motors that power the axis of the CNC mill.
What makes the CNC mill tick? It’s the controller board. I don’t want to go into details on how
the CNC controller board has been designed. This is just a quick overview of the project, and a
more detailed description of each subsystem will be written some day. The board is based around a
central PIC controller, the PIC18f2220. An optocoupler bridge isolate the parallel port cable
from a PC from the rest of the board. You cannot see this bridge on the picture below as it is
SMD mounted on the back site of the board. 3 arrays of FET transistors are used to provide motor
control, and the firmware written to the PIC micro controller is compliant with commercial CNC
software such as Mach3 and turbocnc.â€