Darrin

Hi Tim,

 

Agreed 100%. I've been in communication with George and he has explained the missed acknowledgement, it wasn't intentional. We're all good and I'm glad to see the project live on!

Thanks everyone for the feedback. Nakchak: I'll have to check out that driver. Amazing that it handles acceleration. Not sure that I understand how it could do that with coordinated axes, or does it handle all 3+ axes on 1 board? I'd be interested in that for my next machine.

I did get an event driven prototype working last night. Used some code I found here for the menu items array. Got it working fine.

The only issue I am running into is having the program stop looking at those interrupts when you choose the menu item "Start Logging". Maybe I am misunderstanding the purpose of the DisableInterrupt. I'll play a little more and If I do / don't get it working, I'll post the code to share or critique.

It sounds like you simply need to call the ClearInterrupt() method after handling the OnInterrupt() event.

If you upload your code we can take a look at it and help you out.

Cheers!

Hey, thanks for the feedback! My netduino is connected to my router and I've given it a static IP address. My laptop then connects to it over wifi using the netduino's IP address. The UI has a settings window where you can enter the IP address for your netduino. Hope that helps, enjoy!

And finally, a video. This shows the incomplete CNC machine cutting a part that will be used for the X-axis.

About 5 years ago, I got this crazy idea that I wanted to build a small CNC machine. I have no idea why, but I couldn't shake the thought. Little did I know at the time that there's an entire geek hobby out there, full of people doing just that!

So I started reading and scouting for parts for my machine. I slowly accumulated stepper motors, linear bearings and lead screws from eBay, mostly second hand to save money while still getting industrial quality.

As a software developer, I wanted to create the motion control software entirely from scratch, and my first attempt was to use a PIC for the stepper control. My thought process was that I would create a windows application to pre-process the g-code and translate this into an efficient stream of packets that I would send to the PIC that would then translate this into the essential stepper direction and control pulses to make the movements happen.

Life got busy, and the project went into mothballs (as these things tend to do). About 6 months ago I discovered the Arduino while reading online, and then a week later discovered the Netduino. This re-awakened my nerdy dream! I write C# for a living, and so the idea that I could write my CNC firmware in C# was almost too good to be true!

I ordered my Netduino, read everything I could about them, then pulled my CNC mechanics out of storage and dusted off the cobwebs.

My lunch breaks and weekends have been consumed with the coding of a controller and creating sketches of a machine that has slowly taken shape and is now cutting parts to aid in its own completion (machine.. build thyself!).

The netduino has proven to be a joy to work with and has been a more than worthwhile replacement for the PIC. It has allowed me to create a feature-rich CNC machine out of thin air, and I'm blown away at how much better it is performing than I had expected.

So I thought that I would share my progress as I round onto the home stretch of having a fully functional CNC machine that can create parts and PCB's from CAD drawings.

For anyone who is interested, I will share the code and the lessons I've learned. Just ask!