Kwartzlab Society Inc.

The stepper motor controller boards for my CNC router project are based on the L297 controller and L298 H-bridge driver combination. The circuit board design is the same as the schematic shown in the L297 datasheet. To keep the size of the boards small, I decided to make them double sided. I also needed to build a parallel port breakout board so I did that at the same time. The schematic and boards were laid out using EagleCad.

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Tonight I decided to try cutting a small intricate gear with the Taig CNC milling machine as a proof of concept experiment for another project that I'm working on. The gear is 1-7/8 inches in diameter. I plan on making much smaller gears but the smallest end mill that I have right now is 1/8 of an inch.

It makes a cool necklace. Now I'm ready to rock.

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I pulled the CNC circuit board mill that I designed and built out of my basement lab and brought it to kwartzlab. I'm working with Karl on the CNC-DIY-FUN theme. This is a 3-axis vertical mill that I built with just a drill press and a hacksaw. The design goals were low-cost and accuracy down to 0.001" to allow milling of circuit boards. While the mechanics of this mill were worked out a while back, it does need better driver electronics and some tramming. Karl, Ben, and I are putting together a kwartzlab toolchain for doing CNC milling (which would also support the eventual laser cutter). The idea is that we will all use the same tools in order to share knowledge/scripts/code/designs and get something together that just works. The components will be:

1. CAD or vector-graphics based program for design
2. CAM to convert design files to a tool path for cutting
3. Mill driver software to interpret the CAM-generated gcode and drive the mill's cutting head

We're building our own tools to support our vision of rapid prototyping, where we can go into the lab with an idea and have a working prototype in our hands within hours instead of weeks or months. That's the goal. If you'd like to donate tools or materials, please contact me.
 

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Gus decided to sell his Taig CNC Milling machine so it now has a good home in my basement.
I put it use right away, cutting out four aluminum support mounts for the 1/2-inch slide rails for the Y-axis of the CNC router that I'm in the process of building. The X-axis and Z-axis of the machine were built using hand tools. Watching the parts materialize as the endmill cut the aluminum was very exciting! The finished parts were perfect.

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On February 23, Tom and Brian dropped by the lab to show us some of the amazing things they have built using their Taig desktop milling machines.
Tom showed us his fascinating Stirling engine . This machine runs on a heat source, in this case a mug of hot water. The cool thing about Toms engine is that it was all done with his Taig mill and lathe. The machine ran for hours sitting on top of the mug of hot water. Very nice precision work!

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So far I've got two things that I would like to accomplish at Kwartzlab.

• Add a serial port to my WRT54GL router
• Play with a CNC/3D printer/rapid prototyper

I'm jumping ahead with a blog posting about the router mounting bracket. But, since I only have a few minutes tonight, here's the mount fabricated out of aluminum with a hacksaw, grinder and a small drill press.
I have completed the X-axis and most of the z-axis of my my CNC machine and will be posting about that soon. The router I decided to use is the RotoZip RZ2000. The mount will allow me to attach the rotozip to the z-axis.

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During one of my robotics adventures this week I was given what appears to be the controller for a robot arm named Excalibur. It was manufactured by a Canadian company known as Robotics Systems International. According to the serial number tag, the company was located at 9865 W. Saanich, Sidney, B.C. Canada. Each degree of freedom on the device actuates a potentiometer that is connected to a controller board with a parallel port output.

Part 1